Blogs of the Round Table: April '09

Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you.

While my topic of choice this month isn't exactly something of an inflammatory nature, it leads into a social issue that I believe a lot of people are avoiding discussion about.

"Today, 1 in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined. It occurs in all racial, ethnic, and social groups and is four times more likely to strike boys than girls. Autism impairs a person's ability to communicate and relate to others. It is also associated with rigid routines and repetitive behaviors, such as obsessively arranging objects or following very specific routines. Symptoms can range from very mild to quite severe. "
-AutismSpeaks.org

Autism is, frankly, a genetic epidemic. It is a massive drain on both private and public resources, and individual mental health. Unfortuantely, most people still don't understand the Autistic Spectrum, unless they happened to come across a serendipitous primetime news hour, or an issue of Time that deals with the subject.

This post will be an attempt to design a game that would allow people to understand what it's like to be in the mind of a severely Autistic person. I feel that much more empathy is needed by the populace at large, before they'll be able to make informed decisions on the welfare of Autistic people as a whole. The mechanics will be made primarily on inferance and intent, instead of psychological accuracy. I'll be basing the experience off of the habits of my step-brother.

I believe the best way to present Autism would be to have a particular Heads Up Display, on first person perspective.

The feeling I want players to have is that of frustration, caused by logic-based chaos. Glancing at a row of books would have them automatically count themselves off with both visual and audio cues. Subtlety would work best, so imagine a thin line with a circled number at the end of it. If an object is out of place in the arrangement, the line would be an angry contrasting color, to annoy the player into making things properly organized.

My step-brother can bang a plastic drinking glass on a surface in a perfect beat for hours, if his appetite allowed, while balancing random stuff on his head. His tactile sense is heightened and insatiable, compared to an average person's. These two factors will be represented as Hunger and Balance meters. Affected by those will be a Mood bar.

If you were to perform touch-based actions, place things on your head, or go swimming, your Balance meter will increase. If you eat, your Hunger bar decreases. And yes, they're supposed to be opposite, for the sake of chaos.

As your Mood bar suffers, so does the HUD. Your content semi-singing becomes more whiny or more bold and forced. More objects will be labeled as you see them, and they will be labeled with the most random pictures possible. Flipping the light switch will start producing pictures of dogs, clouds, and writing utensils. (He can also spend a long, long time flipping lights on and off.) Everything that should be producing pictures that group them together somehow, instead display things that have no logical connection.

As your Mood decreases, so does that of the people around you. As they become more stressed, they start doing the same thing as objects you see. In your vain efforts to understand what they're feeling, they begin making absolutely no sense in what they say and what they're labeled as.

It's meant to be more of a simulation, though attempting to play with the goal in mind of telling the NPCs around you something could work as well.

The point behind it all is that I feel very, very afraid about the future of disabled people. What's going to happen if we can't provide for them? What's going to happen when their parents die, and they're delegated to the government to be taken care of? Will their treatment be up to standards of human rights? What happens if the government can't? What happens when the people who need to make decisions, have to do so even though they have no idea about the subject?

Who's going to be there to prevent unethical scientific treatment? Who's going to be there to advise the parents after unfortunate genetic analysis of their newly-fertilized baby-to-be?

Who's going to answer the question no one can safely ask?

Uzumaki Prototyping

Had great fun tonight, making progress with the board design for the Uzumaki game.  

Over the next few days I'll be going through the Manga, again, making World and Story cards, with plenty of different effects to test out.  For example, a Story card from Chapter 3, "The Scar," could read: "Spin movement - all other characters move towards yours that many spaces, using shortcuts if possible."

Oh, that's another thing.  I'm throwing out dradels for a few very good reasons.  

1. No dradels = less cost

2. No dradels = no losing said dradels

3. Using the spinner instead will further reiterate the influence of Dragon Pond on the characters, and the player's influence on Dragon Pond.

Brilliant, really.  Wish I was the one to think of it...

Resort vs. Sandbox MMOG Design Part 1 - Immersion

As my adventures in Darkfall continue, so does the analyzing of its design concepts. This post was actually started several days ago, and has been slowly germinating ever since. Now it's just too big for its pot, so I'll be splitting it into two parts. Part 1 will venture into the systems which make players attempt to have fun, in Darkfall Online and World of Warcraft. Part 2 will contrast the risk and reward circuits between both games. 

Despite Aventurine's self-destructive attitude towards its community, they are in fact continuing to make Darkfall Online a functioning game. Cities finally have gates to go with their gatehouses. They've balanced out more pseudo-exploits that take advantage of the macro mindset. More people have successfully purchased it. However, they still don't give warning before server restarts, even though players can lose their mounts or rafts when that happens. They say they're working on a fix for that, but in the meantime they give the cold shoulder to unfortunate players. Apparently, a clan managed to bring the entire server down just by building a guard tower, which was glitched to the point it attacked its makers. Two steps forward, one step backward, apparently.

They may not know what they're doing on a Public Relations level, but Aventurine did pretty well for themselves by designing a world system that empowers its playerbase to make their own fun. Experienced players are self-guided in their playspace, as they don't need missions or quests in order to procure a productive experience. Instead, other players and player-driven situations provide opportunities.

Darkfall, simply stated, relies heavily on players being responsible for their own immersion.

A game like World of Warcraft, however, makes the player into a tourist.  They're shuffled from one location to the next activity, towards bigger and cooler locations, to more awesome drinks and fireworks.  They can give themselves up, and go with the flow.  The sweet, turn-off-your-brain river of repetition and reward.

Residents of Agon are left to their own devices, with little guidance outside of other players. They become engaged beyond the aesthetics and simple mechanics, quickly joining the rain of pebbles descending on the pond, each attempting to push back the waves from enemy players.  In Darkfall, even a newbie can help influence the world stage, if they're at the right spot at the right time.  That's pretty exhilirating. 

For example, you start off in one of the racial starting cities - one of three surrounding fortresses per race Capitol.  Quickly getting ordered to kill goblins, you run out with your newbie weapon and start the difficult fight, slowly collecting crappy armor as you watch your skill go up with the weapon.  Passing by the city is a small patrol of a large clan, who you strike up a conversation with.  Impressed with your outlook, they give you a mount so you can follow them to their home city.  Along the way, you manage to spot a large enemy force stalking your party, and you alert your new allies.  They quickly alert their clan on Ventrilo, and set up an ambush. 

Because of you, 10 players lost everything on their characters. And it's your first day.

By limiting the game-driven influence on a player, they allow the user to take a larger ownership - and investment - in the game experience itself. 

Contrast this with something like World of Warcraft, which is designed around holding the player's hand as their character simply follows the giant glowing exclamation marks to their next activity. Naturally more options become available to a player later on the game, concerning what they want to do in Azeroth, just as return visitors know what rides to attend or avoid when they go to Disneyworld.

This isn't inherently bad design, as WoW's success can attest.  I do wonder, however, if people in Azeroth become more mesmerized than immersed in the world.  I've heard somewhere that the human brain easily goes into auto-pilot when in a sensory-collection mode, as if in a grocery store.  

Due to the ever-changing conditions that lie just under the surface of Darkfall, though, I find myself almost always engaged on a higher level.

State of Darkfall Online

The steady fall of Ultima Online has taken with it the promised land of persistent, hardcore PvP. Nearly all MMOGs since have focused on the EverQuest/MUD-based model of gameplay. By simplifying and streamlining those theories, World of Warcraft introduced a huge audience to the genre. These 'carebears' ended up marginalizing the players out there who desired something more out of an MMOG since every company wanted to take a slice of Blizzard's multi-million-dollar-per-month cake.

Being 'gamers first,' and not businessfolk, Athens-based indie company Aventurine has struggled through nearly a decade of development. Often whispered as Ultima Online's 'spiritual successor,' Darkfall would reintroduce the concepts of risk, danger, and control to the MMOG playbook. Full loot, first-person style combat, and character skill-based stats had the hopeful drooling and the naysayers crying, "Vaporware!"
Finally, late last year, Darkfall entered its Closed Beta. Not everyone was let in, but I was fortunate enough to participate. While the world of Agon had its glitches, its potential was easy to see. Players didn't have levels, so there was no "you have to be this old to ride the mount" mechanic. Someone could come in game, get geared up by a friend, and start fighting other players. If they really wanted to, at least.
At the end of February, Darkfall was 'launched' in an absolutely terrible fashion. A sequence of hoops was created, and at the end was a pre-order which would allow beta-testers to have a head start. At least, that was the plan.
The Account Management that Aventurine used was inadequate for the demand, on top of ISP issues preventing a great deal of people from even seeing the webpage properly to begin with. Some Accounts which were made - like mine - were bugged from the beginning to never work. Others would only pretend to pre-order the game, instead failing utterly.
Unsurprisingly, the Account Management link that was given out to the Beta Testers as a whole was quickly posted to the forums. Aventurine was too busy trying to get its game launched to even apologize properly (read: give them Accounts) to the beta testers left high and dry. While they've since fixed Account Management and everyone who wants an Account can make one, not everyone who wants to purchase the game can, at the moment. There's just not enough servers for the demand.
This is all beside mechanics which had yet to be fully balanced while still in Beta. Mounted combat was given a huge boon right before 'launch,' but refinement of the new damage dealt had yet to occur. Sieges - the practice of, not neccessarily including Warhulks and Cannons - were far too rare to have given much accurate feedback. The servers would still shut down for maintenance at the drop of a hat, with no warning, essentially destroying any travel progress one has made along with their mount. 
However, those who considered themselves fortunate enough to have taken their chance at purchasing Darkfall soon found intense sync issues once back in-game. At its peak, the most profitable thing to do was fish for lobster, since a player was unable to react to the goblins blinking around them.
While the syncing was being worked on, Aventurine prevented new purchases of the game. There was a new issue, with the queue to enter the game growing longer and longer. Players were leaving their clients on while they went to work, and were still waiting for a play slot when they returned home. In order to allow people to play Darkfall from any browser, the Darkfall Simulator was made - essentially a few images on a web-page showing Darkfall's unmoving queue. In essence, people were paying to wait to play an Open Beta version of Darkfall. 
For those still in-game, lag is still a major issue when large groups gather. Though outside of that, I'm reassured that Darkfall is very enjoyable for those players who love skirmish-sized combat, as well as having a sense of pride for building a city. 
It bears clarification: the players in-game are a fraction of those who want to be. The community is exceedingly frustrated with Aventurine. I clearly remember stating back in Beta that I would pay the subscription just to sight-see, since Darkfall's settings could be so beautiful. There were times I could just sit down on a cliff and watch the clouds go by. That charm is still there, but its being eclipsed by Aventurine's projected incompetance more and more. 
It's harsh to phrase it that way, and I agree. If you think I'm overdoing it, you should visit Darkfall's forums. At least I have compassion. I think what Aventurine has done is spectacular, and they have the making of one of the 'essential' MMOGs. However, the cold shoulder that the Darkfall community feels from Aventurine only amplifies the game's shortcomings, and further threatens its longevity. 
As can be expected, a lot of players and players-to-be are wondering about the true state of Aventurine's finances. It's not a huge step of logic to consider that the company was forced, one way or another, to launch before the game was ready in order to start some sort of cash flow.
Despite a stumble out of the starting gate, Aventurine and Darkfall can still rejoin the pack. There is an obviously neglected niche, which Darkfall (mostly) covers. Aesthetic and social details, which are outvoted by the hardcore PvP types, need to be addressed as soon as mechanics are balanced well. Otherwise, Agon will be a simulation instead of a world.
Even though the community is highly dedicated to Darkfall, 'forumfall' is quite simply too toxic to stand. Players are juggling the theories of arrogance, incompetence, and apathy in order to cope with Aventurine's vague and shallow-looking Public Relations. The company's image needs more than a pinata saying, "There will be ample compensation for any missed game-time." 
I believe that offering up some transparency into the operations of Aventurine would go a long, long way. Several studios have successfully used developer video-diaries and mini-documentaries to help with an irritable playerbase. The outspoken players may tend to be fickle and crude but they're actually very forgiving. And patient, too.
In short, Darkfall is having trouble with its eggshell. Aventurine seems to be an aloof parent doing the best it can. The hatchling isn't exactly strong enough for the real world quite yet, but now that it's here the only option is to nurture it. The beast has a strong heart, and as long as Aventurine can keep itself alive I think Darkfall can grow out of its emaciated and bewildered state into a fire-breathing contender.