Justin Achilli

Thursday

04Mar2010

You'll Do Nothing and Like It

March 4, 2010

The PC is stunned and cannot take any action, until the event timer expires and he may resume autoattacking as normal.

I think it's bad game design to tell a player, "You can't play." That's common sense, I would hope, but I've seen a variety of effects of the stunned-state variety that render the character powerless to take action. World of Warcraft has a stunned condition like this, and last I played it, Lord of the Rings Online had it, too.

The goal of being able to stun a character is obvious. It's a good combat tactic that suggests the character is overwhelmed, surprised, crippled, or what have you to such a degree that, for a short time, he has a reduced capacity to perform. It can be combat-related (as it is in most cases) or it can be some other special effect, such as being gripped by fear or ravaged by some exotic toxin. The situations they're aiming to simulate -- those are cool. But the non-system of "just sit there" is just short of criminal.

That's the key: a reduced capacity to perform. Give the player a penalty to actions. Reduce his available options. Whatever you do, for the love of God, let the player continue to participate.

In most cases, the first time I encounter a stun that renders me completely unable to take any actions, I think hardware malfunction if it's a video game. Thereafter, when I understand that it's a game feature (in someone's mind, I suppose), it just becomes frustrating. In a tabletop game that dictates I can take no action, I check Facebook on my iPhone.

I'm willing to suspend active participation during, say, exposition, or during a dramatic moment when my character is bound and captured and powerlessness is part of the tone being set. But a one-and-a-half second "nothing works! LOL" situation while leetle stars doodle-do around my head? Blow it out your ear. Or worse, at the tabletop, when multiple real-time minutes might elapse between my actions and my only participation is to sit there checking iPhone Facebook? That's not game design, that's do anything except play the game design. What possible motivation could exist for telling me I can't play when I'm already playing?

Justin Achilli |

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Tuesday

02Mar2010

Requiescat In Pace

March 2, 2010

I think I dated this girl once.A great many stories revolve around defeating and killing the Big Bad Foe, which isn't exactly a revelation. I've been thinking about ways to revisit this hoary old plot point, and one of the avenues I'm exploring is not new and clever ways to kill Big Bad, but to make sure Big Bad stays dead. In fact, I don't even know that the killing is necessary in and of itself. I can probably keep that story element as a piece of history, given certain assumptions, so I'm obviously after a different sort of challenge.

Historically, separating an individual's head from his body served to accomplish this at least part way. Superstitions aside, most of these were cases of wanting to keep an individual's followers from rallying to a martyred leader, as with William Wallace or Vlad Tepes, but some occult aspects are sometimes associated with the act, as with John the Baptist. (And I suppose Vlad Tepes can probably fit here, too.)

What I'm really look for is a quest-type storyline that's more preventative than overtly empowering. The protagonists don't necessarily receive the grail at the end of the quest, they manage to stave off the occurance of some horrible thing. This is, of course, the bailiwick of many Cthulhu tales, the culmination of which is buying the world a little extra time before "the stars are right" again, but also has precedent in other fantasy fiction, as in "The Hour of the Dragon," in which Conan's ultimate foe is a long-dead sorcerer of Acheron raised from the dead by a faction of jealous conspirators. The reward for success is continued wellbeing, at least for the time, and makes a refreshing break from the standard model of task resolution equals item upgrade.

What about you? Have you used "And stay dead!" in any of your games or writing endeavors?

Justin Achilli |

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Monday

22Feb2010

Loss as a Positive Characteristic

February 22, 2010

I've been peeking around at a few freebie games scattered across the web and found one that manages to strike a resonant chord with me: Elegia by John Higgins of Relative Entropy Games. It's a retro-clone, as are so fashionable among the tenured tabletop gamers these days, and it's built to support a specific style of tabletop-videogame hybrid, the 8-bit quest RPG. With that in mind, it's got an absolutely brilliant approach to creating the proper world feel on p. 34:

The world is suffused with a vague, quiet, mostly unspoken sense of lamentation. Nobody knows why this is so, because most of the world’s true history has been forgotten.

I love games with this feel, particularly because they appeal strongly to my sense of nostalgia. In fact, I'm particularly enamored of this specific phrasing. The rest of the paragraph dwells a bit too much for my tastes on Tolkien's mythology and how Elegia doesn't hit those notes, but the core is there.

In particular, I like the sense of innocence that slowly spalls away from the characters in the elegiac worlds often found in vintage video games. It's part bildungsroman, but that's not its only element. Indeed, that tragic loss of innocence as the adventuring characters slowly discover more of their cruel, monstrous worlds and attempt to make them right is very compelling. Their quaint, localized worldview is forced to mature in a bittersweet trek into the world. Dungeons that have lurked perilously close to their homes turn into a globe-spanning adventure to thwart the evil machinations of creatures initially far more powerful than they, and the only way to achieve their goals is to "grow up," sonner than they had planned and possibly in opposition to their simple, idyllic prequel lives.

To that end, Higgins' game has a perfect name, suggesting that loss and emphasizing it in its worldbuilding section, which is admirably brief and poignant.

Special bonus points to Elegia for reducing the encumbrance rules to a coarse-grained "stone" measurement, which lets you get on with the elegia and doesn't make you fine-tune how many pounds of rope your character has in his backpack.

Go get Elegia. It's free to download, and if you dig it, tip your hat by buying a print copy.

Justin Achilli |

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Wednesday

17Feb2010

Guest Lecture: The Ethics of Exploration

February 17, 2010

I've had the opportunity to attend a couple of interesting events over the past few weeks that have given me some good food for thought. While much of the craft of game design is introspective, outside influences are critical not only for verisimilitude in games, but to prevent the medium from becoming hopelessly exclusionary. Nobody wants a game that you have to already play games to enjoy. (Well, some people want that, but they're not usually the sorts of people who are fun to actually play games with -- they're the extreme lifestylers who want to hole up in their hobby and use it as an identity with which to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.) I even use this as interview criteria: I always ask in interviews what other interests the candidate has besides gaming and if they answer, "Really, gaming is it," they get a big ol' thumbs-down from me.

Digression notwithstanding, one of the presentations I attended was the Ethics of Exploration, given by the vatican's astronomer, Br. Guy Consolmagno.

The presentation itself covered a lot of ground and I took from it some expanded thinking horizons. In terms of history, everyone remembers Galileo... but can you name the pope who brought him to trial? Galileo's story resonates with people because it's essentially human to wonder what's out there. Asking the question satisfies a "hunger in the soul," which is why we remember Galileo instead of those who condemned him and their comparative small-sightedness.

Much of what I pulled from the Ethics of Exploration was content related, stuff to construct games about or questions to ask in games rather than systems with which to create new games. A few of the topics that excited me here were:

Gah. Who to root for in the clash of good vs. good?A "conflict among goods": The goods in this case are things that are good, as opposed to products or resources. We often speak of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, but how often must we choose from among multiple outcomes that are all positive? So many of today's games feature dark and dystopian game settings. So many others offer the "Jesus or Hitler?" paradigm, purporting to offer moral choice but really offering pick-extreme-good-or-extreme-bad gameplay paths. Wouldn't it be refreshing to be able to pick an outcome from among a variety of things that are awesome? My mind immediately springs to a golden age sci-fi tale or a mythic idyll, but those are only my immediate responses.

Ethically obtained specimens: Is it ethical for a scientist to conduct research for the greater good on a speciment knowingly obtained under illegal or morally (or ethically) wrong circumstances? This is the classic "misunderstood scientist" trope, but it has plenty of mileage left in it as the thrust of a game story. The player might be obtaining the specimen, or he might be part of the group that plans to perform the research.

1) Discover meteor. 2) ??? 3) Profit!The ethics of economy: About once a year, a meteor of approximately one-kilometer size passes near enough to the earth, well, to be a meteor. Extrapolating from samples, a one-kilometer meteor would be worth tens of trillions of dollars in salable value. So let's say some entity -- a government, a commercial concern, a scrappy bunch of players -- invests in a sound method of grabbing this meteor (itself probably tens of billions of dollars in cost) and manages to pluck it out of the sky. Let's say this happens in the middle of nowhere. How would the local economy of that nowhere respond to suddenly having tens of trillions of dollars worth of inflation dumped into it?

Subverting the purpose of playing a game: Ultimately, Brother Consolmagno stated, to refuse to make a choice will always be a mistake. I don't know how to wring a playable facet from this, since a game is a series of choices with consequences, but there's something about the refusal to take action in a given situation that has story potential. Perhaps an authority in the story refuses to take action until swayed toward a course by the players, who must accumulate enough information to choose intelligently (or perhaps control the information influx to suit the course of action they want).

Oh, it was Pope Urban VIII who tried Galileo, by the way. In a bit of cosmic justice, his villa is now the location of the Vatican Observatory.

Justin Achilli |

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