There's no "game" in my game!

To the Teeming Millions:

Most MUD's are toys. Don't get me wrong. Some MUD's, like SOE's very fine and dandy Infantry, are games. But most MUD's are toys because they lack a single objective Victory Condition. The whole point of most MUD's is to facilitate continued play. If you include in your business plan the objective of going out of business six months after launch, then your investors will help accelerate your schedule by not investing. One can't beat the efficiencies of capitalism!

But looking at the present crop of MUD's, we find ourselves staring at a toy. We are free to make up any goals we like and I really do appreciate this freedom. Sometimes I like to pick out some space and pretend anyone who enters it is an invader and try to beat the tar out of them, but usually I like to go walkabout and explore. I have noticed, with great dismay, the only game element present takes the form of a minigame.

At most of the bars I frequent, there is a console on one end which hosts a variety of games ranging from card games to action games. I call these machines video crack. This is because I've noticed impoverished barmaids will feed any dollar they grasp into the machine as if under some indomitable compulsion. Let's call these games minigames because they are typically completed within a few minutes. I've seen an awful lot of MUD's and a lot of awful MUD's, and in all of them the only game element present takes the form of a minigame and is known as combat. I know I'm not addressing quests. This is because they usually take the form of Kill ten rats… and therefore are adequately covered by the current heading.

Video Crack would facilitate billiards, ninepins, darts, and a host of other games. Why is it I can't find a single pair of horseshoe pits in all of the land? Darts have been present in taverns ever since there were taverns. There isn't much which is better than enjoying a few pints with the lads and bowling down some ninepins in the alley by the pub. Some people like to use the MUD as nothing more than a fancy-pants IM, and why should they be alienated? The more the better! says I.

People hate to walk. I have walked, at a leisurely pace mind you, from one end of the Regnum world to the other. I didn't mind it at all. It only takes a few minutes and I get to enjoy some nice scenery. Other people demand that fast travel stuff. It is a public fact some players of WoW have even resorted to Real World prostitution just to acquire a mount in the game. This is why many MUD's have a fast travel system often involving instantaneous teleportation. The player simply clicks a boat's gangplank with the Fondle Something icon and he is instantly transported to the far side of the world if he has the necessary funds. While this may be cute and convenient, why not instead launch a game of Beer Pong with a sailor? This involves timing a set of mouse clicks with a strange set of oscillating meters (this paradigm is often used in Golf and Billiards on the Video Crack machines, but is dated as far back as the Atarii 2600 console) with the intent of launching a small ball or pea into a cup at the opponent's side of the table. If the player makes his shot, then the sailor has to chug and his skill level decreases. No matter if the player makes his shot, play transfers to the sailor so he can make his. If the sailor makes his shot, then the player's meters behave ever more erratically. Play continues in such an alternating manner until either character is completely drunk or either opponent scores 15 points. Why all of this? The player's score will determine how close to his destination he lands. If the player scores 15 points then he arrives at his destination, otherwise he will land at a port short of his destination (but closer than from where he started). This is because if either character gets drunk then the captain will eject the player's character from the boat at the first port of opportunity (he doesn't need riff-raff distracting his staff from their duties). If the sailor wins the game, the character might wash up on a beach (again, at a point nearer to his destination than from where he started, with the distance perhaps proportional to his score and the 15 point limit) after jumping ship in order to avoid paying off some rather steep wagers made to the sailor while a bit tipsy.

Picking a lock consists of nothing more than clicking a door with the Do Something Shady icon and then the computer rolling some dice. Why is that? In Hillsfar, picking a lock invoked a very cool minigame. I start the minigame with a set of random lockpicks. The higher my skill, the more picks I have. The locks are a random set of tumblers. The lock's difficulty determines the count of tumblers. The lock must be picked within a time limit. The time limit starts at a base value, and is then is increased in proportion to my skill and decreased in proportion to the lock's difficulty; tough locks give you less time and high skill gives you more time. If I fail, then the lock remains sealed to my character until I improve my skill. If I succeed, then the door opens and my character may pass through the portal. Play consists of a sequential pattern match. If there is a tall tumbler with a wedge cut out of it, then I need to use the short pick shaped like a wedge. I must pick the tumblers in order from left to right. There is no guarantee I will have the required pick, hence a positive motivation to increase my skill. This sort of thing could be accomplished (including graphics) in no more than 20 hours. Why is there no game in my game?

I never liked Whack-a-Mole. This game, commonly found at carnivals and the Dave & Buster's and Chuckey Cheese franchises, is somewhat interesting. The player has a padded mallet and must *whack* plastic targets (shaped like a moles) which rise up out of a set of holes at random times. If the player does not strike a mole, it will recede back into her recesses awaiting another summoning. If the player does strike his target with yon mighty padded mallet, then mole recedes as above but the player also scores a point. The object is to score as many points as possible in the time aloted. So why is that crafting stuff simply a matter of clicking the Vibrating Hammer icon, the computer rolling some dice, and the success or failure being reported back to the player? I propose an alternative. The computer makes a dice roll, and if successful the character is guaranteed a very shoddy item but then Whack-a-Mole is launched. The player would be presented with a picture of a sword which becomes warped identically to the moles described above. The player's objective is to strike these deformities out of his sword. After the minigame completes, his score will determine a bonus quality to the item. The greater the player's score, the greater the quality of his product. This also has a nice side-effect of thwarting some bot crafting. If people want to just execute a craft script in their sleep, then they will only succeed in creating worthless junk. If people actually play the game, then they will craft exquisite treasures.

Even the classic combat minigame can be improved. Many MUD's go to a great deal of effort and expense at creating some sort of arena where player characters might duel. This is absurd. If I wanted to duel with you, I'd slap your face with a gauntlet and demand your presence in the commons at the next sunrise. If I merely wanted to gank a newb, then I'd just sneak up behind you while you were reading a merchant's shop dialog… If you want to kill someone, then just use your sword where you presently are! No one actually spectates at those arenas anyway. But if you want to gain honour through dueling then I might point out The Secret of Monkey Island had perhaps the best dueling system there ever was.

Oh yeah?

Some Thoughts on Design

Greetings, True Believers!

Design is very much like being a sculptor; a designer's job is to remove all elements which are unnecessary. Cool ideas like rolling dice against charts, or having hard counters based on colours (or whatever), and so forth are all older than Methuselah. The trick is to home in on your vision and then just remove as much cruft until you have the core gameplay.

Painting isn't hard. Anyone with access to PBS will have no trouble watching enough Bob Ross re-runs to become technically competent. The trick, according to an artist friend of mine who is quite good at his craft, is not knowing how to paint: it is knowing when to stop painting.

Consider Street Fighter or Samurai Showdown. These are indeed the architypical examples - the very blueprints - of the fighting game genre. Gameplay is fluid, ergonomic, and accessible. Differing styles of personal choice are facilitated via multiple avatars, and yet all avatars comparable to such a degree that in any 1-on-1 match no avatar is at any perceptible disadvantage. There are simply no extraneous elements, and there are no elements lacking. All functionality required to whup some ass is present, and any additional functionality would actually hurt the product. Another example of elegant design might be western Chess.

As an exercise let's look at some sort of combat game. We could go in the ever popular tradition of Dune 2 (successor to Battletech 2, and precursor Command & Conquer) where we buy units and buildings with finite mutually accessible resources in an attempt to defeat the OpFor. To mix things up there are restrictions such as certain units may only be purchased after specific buildings have been purchased. This is not the only approach. I recently kibitzed a game of Advanced War 2 and was happily surprised by the elegance of the design.

There are no extraneous units (often the unit list of a game is simply an insulting exercise in hyperbole) because each unit serves a specific purpose and all units are necessary. Gameplay is simple, thus liberating the belligerents to focus on their battle plans rather than forcing them to navigate esoteric icons and continuously peruse arcane manuals for unit capabilities. Advanced War 2 is turn-based. This refreshing blast from the past not only permits to one a moment of contemplation, but goes so far as to require it. One cannot modify the play area in any way; there are no accessible means of destroying cities or planting down new factory complexes. The resources are infinite but bound and are designed around the concept of the constant- or zero-sum game; capturing an opponent's city deprives him of revenue while enriching your coffers at the same time.

These RTT games are most usually misnamed as an RTS - misnamed because according to Carl von Clausewitz (father of the modern field of Military Science) the play involved is almost entirely within the Tactics side of warfare. So let us, for sake of argument, ponder the design of our own wargame, and let us assert we are not interested in making a clone of Dune 2 or Advanced War 2. Where to begin?

Warfare is a political activity. From December of 1941 through September of 1945 it was the foreign policy of the United States of America to be at war with the Empire of Japan. The every day sense of diplomacy, talking about aims and grievances, would not manifest the goals of the United States and the Empire of Japan made no attempt to do so (indeed, relations were already strained by our repeated protests against their Manchurian campaign). So perhaps one might brush off their Kissinger books and perhaps let the players command nations instead of battalions. We see that countries typically go to war only after some pretext has been established (even Hitler made excuses to justify many of his conquests), and we need look no further than Chris Crawford's excellent Balance of Power. The object of that game was to avoid a nuclear showdown with the USSR (or a nuclear showdown with the USA if playing as the USSR) because such an event ends the game (an interesting exercise in a negative Victory Condition!) and everyone loses because the Earth has been annihilated. If MAD is proscribed (or at least not made automatic), then one might permit conventional war in addition to cold war; escalating the DefCon through diplomatic crises would send the army rolling along to decide with bullets what the diplomats could not conclude with words! If MAD is desired, perhaps after a certain intensity of conflict could unlock the nuclear options (thus leaving the original Victory Condition intact, but permitting greater freedom with one's foreign policy).

But wait! We could drill down a level here. Dönitz was most preoccupied with destroying as much Alliance shipping as possible for the obvious reasons: weapons never constructed are never deployed. This then brings up an idea for industries. Since the Axis powers were making preparations long before they struck, and the United States only lately entered into a wartime economy, one might even attempt to simulate the salient aspects of modern economic thought. After all, a nation cannot indefinitely maintain, to the satisfaction of her populace, a wartime economy during peacetime, and peacetime economies behave very differently than wartime economies (even among socialist economies), one could add considerable depth. Perhaps one could list out a score or two of commodities, then create production functions to transmute some into others (input-output production functions), and perhaps even more to include the notion of intermediate commodities (consumers don't directly buy ball bearings, but they buy plenty when they purchase an automobile engine)…

Perhaps now we see our enthusiasm getting the better of us. This is not so much a game, as it is performing some min-max equations in a spreadsheet. The idea of my economy being hijacked because you annexed the major sources of rubber and gum might sound exciting, and just as I might be excited at the prospect of seeking to pressure you into abandoning the junta you recently installed in Nicaragua by wrecking your economy via currency dumping, doesn't mean these things are fun. Torpedoing elements of a convoy might be fun, but look at what we have here. We ought to assume, for example, that as leaders of our nations we have assembled economists and industrialists to make the optimal production schedules on our behalf because (to put it simply) none of our players are that smart. Players want to influence their productions (they may want to maximize aircraft production, or they might opt for a land war, for example) but they by no means want to micro-manage every single stinking thing. You might think you can automate much of this with a spreadsheet macro (or a small subroutine if one is making a computer game) since the Simplex method is well known. If that is the case, then why include all that rubbish in the first place?

Consider Axis & Allies. Each territory has a certain amount of value, and players are free to purchase whatever they wish with their tax revenues. Ahh, but we might still want some of those juicy strategic aspects such as oceanic commerce raiding. This can be accomplished if one required colonial areas to actually transport their revenues via ship. Blockades and raiders are now permissible, and we haven't turned a good idea into a terrible spreadsheet. This is an example of knowing when to stop painting. So we seek political prestige via foreign policies, and at our disposal are the various proxy wars, diplomatic crises, direct conflict, and various economic machinations (embargoes, blockades, commerce raids, annexation, etc) and we haven't required of our players an advanced mathematics degree. The rules (if using BoP as the starting point) are easy to learn and yet difficult to master. All features of the game enrich the game, rather than detract from the core play. There is both a positive Victory Condition (have the greatest prestige score after so many turns) and a negative Victory Condition (do not initiate a nuclear war) so play is guaranteed to end, yet there are a multitude of strategies available.

All of the previous being as it may, what if you really want to make some sort of economics game? If the warfare is minimized, and play centers on logistics (moving commodities from one location to another) and production (harvesting or manufacturing commodities), then you know who you are, and you also know who your players are. You're going to need to study up on linear programming for the various production functions required to harvest and manufacture commodities, logistics to actually transport your commodities from production centers to consumption centers, and the mathematics of game theory (John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern) for your production schedules and end-user consumption. I warn you: the first thing you'll trip over is the labour function. I would suggest reading Mancur Olson's three Earth-shattering works. The second thing you'll trip over is your economy probably won't support Stagflation. If you somehow proscribe that, then you're really missing out of the beauty of falling consumption concurrent with rising price levels. That's the sort of thing which would make your hypothetical Sim Industrialist Tycoon get off the ground. Hint: your simulation will (usually) stagnate unless and until you get a financial market up and running, because currency is a commodity just like any other. Bonus points: Let the business cycle be monthly, but let the banking system operate quarterly, update populations with a variant of The Growth Equation, and run the game for 200 years. It's a hoot!

In conclusion we see much of design theory focuses on identifying core gameplay. Once this has been identified, the game is not complete unless and until there is nothing left to remove! There is rarely anything to add, but usually oodles and oodles of distraction and chaff which must be diked out and chiseled off because extraneous elements make the game worse rather than better. Adding something is not the same as improving something. If something extra is desired, it ought not to overlap with an existing feature. One example would include how the units of Advanced War 2 do not overlap in function. Another would be our improvement to BoP, where we added a new avenue of play but did not demean the existing modes.

I cannot stress this enough. Your MUD does not need two healers. The Martians did not need two tripods. Your fighting game does not need twenty eight different buttons labeled punch. I swear to God: the next time I ask for a unit list and receive an insulting exercise in hyperbole, I will break the fucking fingers of the brain-dead designer who cursed this Earth with their rubbish.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 17:15 train.

Hail! And, err, whatever

Greetings, Teeming Millions.

The purpose of this blog is to explore various avenues and techniques for the construction of games. That is quoted because what is known within the industry as a game is actually a set of several distinct activities. What is the difference between a toy and a puzzle? Can a game be made from one or more toys? These questions can only be answered if we first examine some definitions.

Victory Condition

An objective rule which stipulates when play is to cease. If "winners" and "losers" are required, additional objective rules are required.

Game

To be a game, the activity must have at least one Victory Condition. Play must be completely described by objective rules. Play must involve two or more players. Play must be mutually competitive between at least two of the players. Ex: Baseball is a game because it satisfies all of the above conditions, and requires no further conditions.

Puzzle

To be a puzzle, the activity must have at least one Victory Condition. Play must be completely described by objective rules. Play must involve at least one player. If multiple players are involved, play must be mutually cooperative for all players. Two people collaborating to complete a crossword would be a puzzle, even though more than one person is involved because it satisfies all of the above conditions, and requires no further conditions.

Toy

To be a toy, the activity must not have any objective rules of any kind. Subjective rules are required. At least one player is required. Players may or may not be cooperative or competitive. Ex: A doll or action figure is a toy because it does not stipulate any objective rules (play consists of solely subjective rules) and does not require more than one player.

MUD

We will call any virtual environment a MUD because it is easier to type than MMORPG, and readily pronounceable.

The definitions are required because there exist within current MUD's serveral modes of play. MUD's (such as the Diku-inspired WoW) often have game elements (implemented as quests), with core play treated as a toy (play continues indefinitely, with players free to decide their own goals). Other virtual environments (such as the United States Army's Unreal-inspired AA) have but a single mode of play: it is thoroughly a game. These differences between WoW and AA are substantial, and the purpose of this blog is to explore said differences and examine the implications of differing combinations with a hope that as modalities are identified, new implementations can be introduced to further the art and science of game design. Ultimately, I would like to see new games developed which do not suffer from the more of the same disease.

Children often display distinct modes of play with pure toys. Some will gather together for a social event (a tea party) and maintain toy modality, whereas others will mutually organize play into game modality (an army men war), and still others might seek to create puzzle modality (a base/house building exercise).

Sometimes the trick is purely in the distinction between a subjective rule and an objective rule. If one player's goal (a subjective rule) is agreed to by all other players then it becomes an objective rule, and thusly game modalities of play can enter into almost any situation. A puzzle can easily become a game or, for example, a game might degenerate into a toy via the abandonment of rules.

Perhaps next I will tell you of THDOK-BRYG-AHHH.