Something Precious

My original intent was to resume the blog with a post in the normal theme of game dev interest, but in the meantime, our family has experienced a disruption that has given me several thoughtful moments.

My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years, and for almost 19 of those years, we've shared our home with Arrow, our cat. As you might imagine, she has become a fixture of our relationship, having outlived career choices and other cats. (We lost a younger cat, Dusty, to breast cancer a few years ago.)

I'm not saying it's been without its tribulations. She occasionally gets it into her head to poop in odd places, especially if we leave her litterbox for too long. She loudly wants breakfast on days I'd rather sleep in. She's knocked over and broken any number of things I wish I still owned in one piece.

But she kept Doni company while I was serving my country. She's a loving animal that we both care for deeply. She makes our apartment a home. Most importantly, we voluntarily took this little being into our care, and she is very much a part of our family.

Last week, there was an accident, and she suffered a broken humerus. It was a completely separated fracture, too high on the leg to splint. The emergency consult at the 24-hour vet clinic didn't paint a hopeful picture. The leg was useless weight that was only going to cause her pain, and her age did not make her a good candidate for orthopedic surgery. Osteoporotic bones do not take pins and plates well, and the mending would have been long, painful, and not guaranteed. There was every chance we would have to put her down.

I'm the man of the couple. There are cultural expectations that I will be the strong and practical one. Right or wrong, my culture has left an imprint on me, and I strive to be the strong and practical one.

This wasn't the first time I've dealt with end-of-life concerns for animals in my care, but none of those prepared me to deal with something as central and long-lasting to my life as this cat. I did OK at the clinic. I reassured Doni that we would make the best decision for Arrow and consoled her when she blamed herself for the accident. I was even supportive for the vet when she had to deal with what turned out to be a DOA cat brought in by a tearful owner.

We got Arrow home with a referal to a surgical clinic for the morning, but not with a lot of hope, before I reached the end of my emotional rope. Doni was out of the room, and I hadn't put Arrow down yet. I sat down with her and had a good cry.

Until that dam broke, I hadn't really been aware of how backed up my grief was. I didn't see much chance that a close friend who relied on me for everything wouldn't have to be killed in the morning on my say. That hurt, and I selfishly took several minutes to wallow in the pain. I'd like to say I thought it would make the goodbye to follow easier, but there wasn't any kind of purposeful intent like that. I just hurt.

Early the next morning wasn't any easier. Arrow still wanted breakfast, and she had stumbled to the food bowl. Watching her try to walk was misery. She'd try to step forward onto the useless leg, it would crumple, and she'd fall on her face. Then she'd try again, and finally she got there, only to fail to figure out how to eat or drink from the dishes.

Later that morning, as we sat in a consult with the surgeon, we felt pretty dismal. When he mentioned amputation, I almost smacked my forehead. I carefully didn't look at Doni, whose face I could just imagine picturing her first personal pet being maimed, but hope surged in my heart. Of course, there was a rollercoaster of emotions left to experience. Doni had to be convinced, blood work had to done to make sure Arrow was likely to survive anesthesia, the procedure had to be completed successfully, she had to convalesce without infection or further injury. Further, was I grasping at comfort for myself or thinking of the best for my tiny charge?

The next morning, the blood work had come back positive, and I gave the order to proceed. Knowing she was cut open that afternoon, with the intent of making a part of her into medical waste, was a lot more distraction than I thought it would be. I didn't get much work done that day.

That afternoon, I got the call that she was conscious and enjoying some morphine derivative or another. My relief was palpable.

Arrow is home now, in many ways normal, but in some important ways, not so much. She still loves a good lap, but we have to be careful of her staples and the cone of shame. She's pooping in some new odd places, but I'm pretty sure that's caused by having to flex completely different muscles as she learns to get around on three legs. Bunny hopping for the litterbox, leaving a trail of poop pebbles, is funnier than it has any right to be.

And she still wants breakfast. Some things are just constant.

All of us have come out of this ordeal closer together. We were lucky. Lucky she's healthy for her age and could survive surgery where some cats would not. Lucky to find a good surgeon where we might have stumbled on a quack and not known in time. Lucky we have decent jobs to pay for the not inexpensive surgery where many families might not have had the wherewithal in today's economy.

Years ago, we accepted something precious into our care, a tiny life that would depend on us for everything it needs to continue, and depend on us to make the best decision when the chips were down. This week, I feel like we lived up to our responsibility. I feel good.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/10/something-precious.html.

If You're Not Part of the Solution

Ubisoft...

/facepalm

For those who don't know, Ubisoft has implemented a new DRM scheme that requires a continuous Internet connection in order to play their games. If you lose connection for whatever reason, the game stops working and any progress since your last save point is lost.

Yeah, you heard right. Single-player games running on your PC with no otherwise valid requirement for online features will shut down if you lose your connection to Ubisoft's servers via the Internet.

Does anyone at Ubisoft understand the word Internet is ancient Atlantean for "Thousands of Laggy Routers"? The ability to use software you've paid for honestly will be subject to loss of use because a key router gets overloaded with Torrent downloads, or any one of the myriad ways to lose connection.

And not because the connection is required for gameplay reasons. No. It's because Ubisoft is concerned with piracy.

OK yeah, I get that piracy is a problem, but this is absolutely not the way to solve it. All this does is increase the effective cost of Ubisoft games, not by monetary measure, but by Pain-in-the-Ass factor. By increasing the cost of their games, without doing anything to increase demand, the quantity demanded by the market will necessarily decrease.

Yes, I've heard Ubisoft's arguments that the online features provided will benefit players. I call Bull. These are very small bonuses, like not requiring discs to install, or the ability to install to multiple PCs, or to save progress on the Internet to resume play on a different PC. These features were already available in the marketplace for little to no cost.

The best part? I predict that this won't reduce the number of pirated copies of the game played by even one. Hacked versions of their games without the DRM code will appear shortly. In fact, this will likely drive up instances of piracy of their games.

Let me be perfectly clear here. I absolutely do not condone software piracy. Being mad at Ubisoft does not justify theft.

That said, people who would not ordinarily have stolen this game will end up stealing it just to play a hacked version that doesn't stop working for stupid reasons. They'll be wrong for doing it, but that doesn't make Ubisoft right. Neither party is being part of the solution.

One of Murphy's Laws of Combat applies here. Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you won't be able to get out. You cannot possibly close every avenue of exploit utilized by software pirates without overburdening legitimate users of your product. This is simply fact, and no amount of overreaction by a clueless studio will change it.

I'm not angry at Ubisoft. There's plenty of impotent rage being directed at Ubisoft right now, so even if I were so inclined, my efforts are unnecessary. No, my feelings regarding Ubisoft are arguably worse from their point of view.

I pity them. They're being stupid and hurting themselves. That's worth my pity. But I don't pity them enough to buy their games with their ill-conceived DRM scheme. I'm not going to steal their games, but I'll do something worse.

I'm not going to play them.

It's a simple economic decision. The cost is too high. So many games get released every year that I don't have time to play them all. If one of them has an inordinately high cost to me, there's always the next by a studio that's not doing something dumb to arbitrarily drive up the cost of their games.

Each person who makes a similar decision is one more voice that won't be talking about Ubisoft's games, won't be telling friends, won't be making recommendations to random strangers in GameStop. That silence is a deathknell to a game studio.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-youre-not-part-of-solution.html.

Focus

Focus. It's the point of convergence of rays of light. It's the concentration of attention. It's the active element in a user interface. It's the key word or phrase of a sentence. It's the clarity of an image.

It's about emphasis at a single point.

Interestingly, at least to me, it's not only tonight's topic, but it's ultimately the reason for tonight's topic.

The plan for the Dynamo Dave blog following the January Challenge was to relax the posting rate, while continuing to write every day. Each day's writing wouldn't necessarily be for public consumption, though ultimately the goal was to use much of it for future blogs as I work on my skills as an essayist.

I figured that by the end of the first week, I'd have enough words about a single topic to assemble most of a post. Maybe I should have thought that through a little more.

Let's take a peek in my pocket notebook. Therein, I've scribbled several ideas for blog posts with a bit of brainstorm for each plus some research directions to develop more.

Here's the list of new topics since the end of the challenge:

• Gaming & the Law
• Magical Jargon
• Word Hacking
• Are We All Playing the Same Game?
• Group Identity
• A Culture's Psychology Through the Lense of Its Vocabulary
• The Internet Is People!
• Commandments of Game Development
• Racism in Game Settings
• Game Industry Weaknesses: Onboarding and Retention

OK, nice list, but with a little bit of work on each, I hit the weekend with not nearly the work into any one of them that I would have liked. Not that I'm really upset about it. I assumed I would have had more trouble with doing anything at all, even with a month of building a habit of daily writing, which turns out not to be the case. Or maybe I'd have trouble having a topic for every week, given that topics were sometimes a struggle during the Challenge. No, I'll take this problem any day. If I can do justice to even half of these, I'll have some solid essays done.

Still, there's a lesson here. Most of my life, I've struggled with focus. In my first attempt at college, I changed majors like I changed socks. As a result, after six years of full and part time study, I ran out of money and burned out on school without a degree. I had a lot of what academic planners call breadth, but not enough depth.

I rarely finish personal projects. At any given point in time, there are about five to seven projects in various degrees of disarray scattered about my apartment. More often than finishing one, I'll decide one has gone too long without attention, and I'll pack it up with notes about where I left off.

I've switched career fields a few times now, from military to manufacturing to technical analyst to programming. Fortunately, I think I've finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. Game development has been the most fulfilling thing I've done with my life. I make my living as a game programmer, but the supplementary pursuit of topics in game design, testing, production, game studies, and community building are endlessly fascinating.

It took me a long time to reach this point, just like it takes me a long time to complete a personal project, because my customary lack of focus spreads my effort thinly across a wide field. But that thin spread builds up over time, and now the very complex personal project of *me* seems to be coming along nicely.

I am, like my blog, a work in progress.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/02/focus.html.

January Challenge #31: Flawless Victory

So what do you know? I did it. A blog post every day for the month of January. I'm pretty happy with the results, 31 fairly meaty posts, mostly of decent essay length. Only #23 was super short, but I couldn't resist the gag, and when it was done, it was done.

Observations

Writing an essay for public consumption every day is not easy. When I put together the two separate exercises of write daily and write for public consumption, I didn't really think about what that would entail. I was worn out creatively after each post, and there wasn't much time or inclination left for other creative pursuits.

Freeform essay writing is easier and more fun than structured technical writing. When I tried putting together the skeleton of a post and then working on each section individually, the results didn't seem as good as when I just started blathering and hit Post when it felt done. Some of that was time pressure. Building the skeleton takes time, and while it helps in the long run to make the work easier to organize, the daily 2-3 hours I gave this task wasn't sufficient to see the payback in time saved.

Writing actually did come easier each day. As promised by many of the writing gurus, the habit builds on itself. Topics came more easily as well. Early in the month, I sat down to the keyboard a few times and just stared dumbly at the monitor for a while. By the end, I didn't need to cop-out with a post about Writer's Block, my last emergency topic, but some of the material for that wound up in the post about Thinking Outside the Box.

Making promises about what to write later was not a great idea. That was pressure I didn't need. Ideas in my journal grew easier without the deadline of wanting to get them posted this month.

Next Steps

First off, the posting rate gets to drop. I have some projects on the backburner that need some attention, including a demo game for Zynga. I don't intend to drop below a post a week.

I want to try again to integrate subskills from technical writing. Blogging once a week will allow more time for document planning and design, and the effort invested in working up a skeleton for each post will have time to pay off.

I have a few ideas for shorter bits to turn into regular side features. Book and game reviews, limited-scope game design thoughts, a more personalized weekly "status report", and assorted similar miscellany.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to drop a note. Your words of encouragement (and criticism) made this experiment easier and more fulfilling.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to read one or more of my idiot ramblings, whether you took the time to comment or not. I wasn't writing for you; I was writing for me. But knowing that you were out there reading my words drove me to make my thoughts as cogent as possible.

Watch this space.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-31-flawless-victory.html.

January Challenge #13: Internet Resources

The Internet is overflowing with useful info for game developers, useful info for everyone else, and info that's useful to no one. Today, I'm sharing some sites I've stumbled across that you might find useful.

Obligatory disclaimer: Unless I mention it specifically below, I do not endorse any products or services offered on these sites.

Advocacy

To roleplayers from the 1980s, it's old news when some religious or political leader tries to pin the world's woes on gaming and gamers. To younger folks, sometimes it's a little surprising. Either way, it can be challenging to marshal a moderate response. Sites like these aggregate relevant news and provide tips for holding your own in a debate on the merits of gaming.

Game Politics
Video Game Voters Network
Commitee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa) - This site focuses on pen & paper roleplaying games, but the info provided is no less useful in the defense of video games.

Free Stuff

Looking for code libraries, graphics, audio, development tools, emulators, or just about anything else? Looks at these sites. Take note: A lot of these goodies are not in the public domain. There are actually limits to your license to use them. Some are freely usable in any non-commercial project but require a license fee for commercial use. Other may require only attribution. Still others have a viral license that requires that a project that incorporates them be release under the same license. Do your homework first!

thefreecountry.com
www.freeprogrammingresources.com
Allegro
Lua
Game Creation Resources
Blender - I can't get over how many professional 3D artists have never heard of Blender. Then they claim that if it's free, it must be crap. This is only my opinion, but... Blender is better than anything Autodesk makes. Don't believe me? That's fine, but see for yourself.

Organizations

If you're a professional, you owe it to yourself to check these out.

Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences
Entertainment Software Association
International Game Developers Association
Serious Game Institute
Project Horseshoe
gamedevmap - Not an organization itself, but this site will help you find them.

Conferences

Go, play, socialize, network, learn fun stuff, score swag.

DICE Summit
Game Design Expo
Game Developers Conference
Games Convention Online
Penny Arcade Expo

Jobs

In this economy, we need all the help we can get.

Game Career Guide
Game Jobs

All-In-One Sites

These sites cover so much territory, that they're impossible to categorize (even though I just did).

Gamasutra - Don't know about Gamasutra? Shame on you. Click. Now!
GameDev.net

That's all for tonight. Later this month, I'll give up URLs for some industry luminaries.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-13-internet-resources.html.

January Challenge #12: Mashups

Who doesn't love a good mashup? Discovering two otherwise familiar experiences combined in an unexpected way can be delightful. A sweet synergy makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It could be argued that the core concept of the mashup, putting two elements together in a new way, is the root of creativity. Our conceptual space is the sum of our experiences, and we can't discern with any accuracy where any new idea that springs into our head actually originated. Did we think a totally new thought, or did a combo of two things we've seen, one last week and the other twenty years ago, suddenly fit together in our consciousness?

"There's nothing new under the sun" is frequently interpreted at the macro level to dismiss a seemingly new phenomenon as something someone else did earlier (and better). I prefer to interpret the phrase at the micro level; when we break a new idea down far enough, it turns out to be constructed of existing atoms of experience.

Games are similarly made up of atoms, elements of design that combine to form the experiences that obsess us. More broadly than individual games, game genres are made up of established complexes of game atoms to create a recognizable type of game experience.

Examination of these established complexes, taking the time to deconstruct them into their atoms, enables us to consciously find compatibilities between genres that maybe haven't been joined before. A particularly good combination might form the basis for a new genre. MMORPGs are simply sandbox social RPGs, but they caught on as their own phenomenon. The next big revolutionary genre of gaming will probably be a similar mashup.

So let's try a couple.

A-Life Strategy. There are games that use Artificial Life concepts as development or programming tools that the player never need experience directly, and there are those that feature it as the core game. Conway's Life is the earliest example I'm aware of. A-Life games derive emergent behavior from the intersection of simple rules, frequently by use of genetic algorithms to select for successful combinations of attributes. A strategy game could make use of this in two ways simultaneously. The player uses an A-Life studio to specify success criteria, combine successful genomes, and introduce random change in order to improve friendly units between deployments. At the same time, initially random enemy units are selected for success, have their genomes combined, and mutated. The next generation of units then meet on the battlefield. Rinse & repeat. The beauty is that the genetic algorithms should slowly converge into enemy behaviors optimized to fight the player's style. Does the player tend to turtle? The enemy should eventually develop hard-hitting fighters with little defense. The advanced player may adopt a given tactic for several rounds to encourage the evolution of behaviors that can be exploited with a change of tactics. Like in Spore, the enemies and friendlies that the player evolves through play could then be shared with other players of the game.

Multiplayer Serious Sports Resource-Management. Serious games, an example of genre of purpose, have a goal other than strictly entertainment, usually to teach a skill or preach a position. In this mashup, the player takes on the role of the coach and/or owner of a sports team. The challenge is to manage salaries, training schedules, media exposure, team member egos, endorsements, contracts, and the like to produce a winning team. Winning is measured in many ways: winning games, maintaining popularity, keeping great players on the team, and all the other ways that sports teams are seen as winners in the real world. As a multiplayer game, teams are pitted against one another in games that the players may or may not be able to affect during play, at least directly. If the team members are fully developed AI NPCs, they might play out the game independently, while players perform actions more appropriate to their role, like yelling at referees, dealing with media spin, or just enjoying an emergent game experience like one might watch a game on TV. The multiplayer aspect also makes for interesting play in the form of bidding for contracts and competing for draft picks.

Try one yourself. Find a handy list of game genres, pick two or more, blend, and serve.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-12-mashups.html.

January Challenge #11: A Powerful Alchemy

I socialize mainly with other game developers, people who speak the common lingo of games; genres and 3D art and gameplay and revenue models and playstyles and and and...

So for the most part, when I refer to a game as casual, social, or viral, I have a reasonable expectation that the listener knows what I mean. The game industry is in its infancy, relative to comparable disciplines, but our jargon is coming along nicely, thank you.

It's easy to forget that not everyone has an easy referent to derive meaning from our funny little words.

Except in the case of casual games, social games, and viral games. The gaming press seems to have no idea what these words mean, so every time I see an article with one of these in the title, I know the actual topic is going to be a crap shoot.

Casual games are misinterpreted the least. That makes sense, given that they spent quite a bit of time in the headlines before social games and viral games made their combined splash. Casual games are typified more often by their contrast with video games as they are more generally understood. They require less commitment to play successfully. It's easy to get there from the word casual.

Casual games can be played for a few minutes as often as you like, whether killing time between tasks at work or each night before dinner. They don't require you to plan your level progression or study a strategy guide or drill your hand-eye coordination. Not that these activities aren't useful or won't lead to improved performance. But a casual game won't feel like it's punishing you for not engaging in them.

It's worth noting that in gaming, the word casual is heavily contextual. Though some would disagree vehemently, World of Warcraft is commonly described as “casual friendly.” You heard me. The intent of the statement is that it's possible to play intermittently for short periods of time, without grinding for elite gear or waiting around for 2 hours for a raid to get started, and still have a good time.

Soapbox
Sure, it's possible to play the game that way, but be aware that the common denizens of World of Warcraft will treat you like a second-class citizen for not having the best available gear for your level or not tolerating the mind-numbing boredom of getting a raid going. If you can find or make a group of casual players who like to play together, choosing gear for a cool look over uber stats, not sticking to over-analyzed optimal builds in order to play an interesting combination, and frequently having to fight green mobs at higher levels because of it but not really caring because less XP means experiencing more content before out-leveling it, treasure them.
/Soapbox

Social games are actually exactly what they sound like, a game which features social interaction with other humans. No matter how intuitive this sounds, it is the most frequently misused genre name in the industry. World of Warcraft is a social game, but you'll rarely hear it described as such. Mafia Wars is not, and neither are its gajillion skinned clones, but the gaming press persistently calls them social games.

And you can't just throw a chat client on your game and call it social. If the gameplay does not feature meaningful interaction with another human, then it's not a social game.

Traditional board games and card games are nearly all social games, and not just because you usually play them face to face with your opponent. Every action you take within these games affects efforts of your fellow players. That's what I mean by meaningful interaction. On the other hand, eight people each playing their own game of solitaire around the same table might be socializing while they do it, but they're not playing a social game.

Viral games are sort of a misnomer. Usually the game itself isn't viral, but the marketing efforts are. The term viral comes from epidemiology, referring to person-to-person spread, or cell-to-cell within a single organism. It thus has to due more with vector of transmission than with symptoms, that is more to do with marketing than with game design.

Viral marketing campaigns aim to encourage players to recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, etc. This is typically encouraged with in-game advantages and abilities that can only be earned by recruiting other players.

If an adoption rate significantly greater than the departure rate can be sustained, the player base expands extremely rapidly. Of course, much like a good restaurant might lose its charm and quality of food or service in the face of extreme popularity due to scaling problems, an otherwise good game might lose its appeal as the servers bog down with the load, or the enemy spawn rate can't keep up, or any of the woes of overcrowding become more annoying. These things increase the departure rate, which will directly decrease the adoption rate, and both will negatively impact the growth rate. The game has hit its peak and will steadily decline into obscurity.

That's OK with the typical viral game studio. They're already onto the next five or six games. A demonstrably successful business model is to madly throw lightly developed games at the target demographic until something sticks and devote resources to further developing that game, but still keep throwing games at the target in the hopes that the next winner will be found before the last one dies.

Occasionally, the game itself goes viral by its own merit. I've heard marketeers say things like “Let's make that go viral!” Rubbish. In my opinion, there's only one thing you can do to spontaneously “go viral”: make an awesome game. Simple phrase, not so simple execution. Playing your game must make the player want share it with their friends. Seeing your game being played or trying it out must make the friends want it more than they want the money it costs, a lot more. You can't measure that sort of thing, except maybe in couch multiplayer high-fives per unit time.

Think about the things I've said about casual, social, and viral games. Now think about this: these descriptors are not mutually exclusive. Let that sink in a moment. There are a lot of very smart developers thinking hard about this very fact. A great deal of creative energy is working toward a game that can be played a few minutes at a time as often as you care to participate, features meaningful interaction with your fellow players and tools to facilitate various channels of communication with friends, has gameplay that encourages you to bring your friends along for the ride, and just might be totally awesome.

That's a powerful alchemy.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-11-powerful-alchemy.html.

January Challenge #10: Ethical Considerations

I had planned to make an entry about ethics in game development, so I've been reading and brainstorming the topic on and off for a week or so. What I've discovered is that no single post could ever do the topic justice. Depending how far you stretch the definition of the word Ethics, and the word has seen some serious stretching, the topic is HUGE.

I'll probably make some more focused entries on the subject later in the month. Today, I'm running down a partial list of the areas of ethical concern in game development, with a few words about each. I won't try to get any depth on any of it, just a view from 50,000 feet.

Early in the process of making a new game, even choosing your target audience is potentially an area of concern. There may be a conflict between what demographic your marketeers are selling to and the age-appropriateness of the content envisioned by the designers and artists. What rating are you going to aim for? Will you choose to push the boundaries of your target rating? Will you sacrifice your artistic vision to make your game a better fit for the rating?

What will your revenue model be? If you're going to experiment with micropay, where do you draw the line between driving legitimate traffic to the company store and predatory marketing tactics? Are you determined to see that players get good value for their money, or will you resort to whatever it takes to get their cash?

Will your game collect personal information about players? If you have their credit card on file for subscription or micropay, there are legal requirements to both collect and protect this information. How far will you go to keep this information out of the hands of potential stalkers and pedophiles?

How rigidly or loosely will you define harassment and griefing? What will the penalties be to the player who engages in these behaviors? What recourse will the victim of these activities have within your customer service system?

What recourse will players have when they feel they have been treated arbitrarily by your customer service department? Will this recourse be handled within customer service or from outside the department?

How will you handle credits to the team? Egos and careers are at stake here. I've spoken to an industry professional who was left out of the credits after working for 18 months on a project, but an admin assistant at the publisher that no one at the studio has ever met, and probably did zip-nada, made the cut.

Will you pursue the latest psychological research into engaging gameplay, engaging to the point of addictive? What about using your game to express an opinion, maybe an opinion that you think is important, but parents might object to?

Law enforcement rears its head from time to time. How would you handle a subpoena to release a player's private information? From a foreign government? That is known to engage in political oppression?

Where do you draw the line between homage and derivative? Willingness on the part of the IP holder to sue is just part of the equation. Some IP holders will sue over non-enforceable similarities. Some IP holders are happy to see very derivative homages in other media.

How about production values? Are you knowingly creating shovelware to get boxes onto the shelf? Do any of your managers hide problems from test to make a milestone date and end up shipping a shoddy product?

Are you out to make a difference or make a buck? Are they mutually exclusive? Will you tackle issues of gender or minorities head on in your game, or find a way to whitewash them?

I've drawn from the top page of my notes on the topic to make this post. I've barely scratched the surface of the relevant books and articles I've found. There's a lot to say on the topic, and I don't know how much of it I'm up to. Watch this space, and maybe we'll find out.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-10-ethical.html.

January Challenge #9: Tic Tac Toe

I kicked a co-worker's ass at Tic Tac Toe this week. Until he threw four orthogonal lines on the whiteboard while waiting for a program to install, I wasn't aware that any adults still play the game with any seriousness.

It didn't go well for him at all. After a few rounds of making him choose which of two winning plays to block, I admitted that I had over-analyzed the game long ago when I wrote a Tic Tac Toe AI that could consistently win or tie unless you knew exactly how it would react to a given game state. It only predicted outcomes one move out, so by manipulating it, you could force it to choose which of two winning plays to block.

Tic Tac Toe is a great learning tool to understand game states. In theory, there are 9! (factorial) ways to place X's then O's onto the game board, but in reality, there are a lot fewer potential game state sequences. First thing, you can remove two thirds of them by realizing that there are only three meaningful opening moves: center, corner, and edge. In response to a center open, there are only two meaningful second moves: edge and corner. And in response to an edge or corner open, there are five meaningful second moves: adjacent corner, non-adjacent corner, adjacent side, non-adjacent side, center.

After that, it's harder to get away with that kind of abstraction, so we're down to 7!*(2+2*5) possibilities. Right? Wrong. Most of these lead to wins before all the tokens can be placed. For example: X upper-left, O center, X lower-right, O upper-right, X lower-left. X wins on its next move, barring catastrophic aneurysm or some other act of god.

Most games descend into reactive play by one or both players by the fourth move and will end in a tie, assuming basic competence on the part of both players. This is why most people lose interest in the game by late childhood. It has two possible avenues to rekindle interest, as a teaching/learning tool to master the concept of game state, or as an exercise in manipulating your opponent.

As I mentioned above, the only way to beat the Tic Tac Toe AI was to know how it would play. The same can be applied to human opponents. I guessed that my co-worker would employ the common wisdom of preferring the center and then the corners, so I made my moves accordingly and won. I then guessed that he would learn from his mistake and alter his approach, and I won again.

In this, Tic Tac Toe shares some characteristics with Rock Paper Scissors, which has a serious following with world championships. I kid you not. In the abstract, RPS is about random choices which should result in even odds of win, lose, or tie. Not so much. It's about reading your opponent, and manipulating them as they try to read you.

Getting seriously stomped at a strategic game can be a valuable learning experience, especially an extremely simple one where you can almost instantly grasp the entire game state, but the fun goes away pretty fast, so I didn't wait long to explain to my co-worker what I was doing. Much like learning how you were fooled by stage magic, the fun was quickly restored. Not a game developer, he might not derive any professional usefulness from the experience, but I hope he learned enough to clobber another co-worker at Tic Tac Toe somewhere down the road.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-9-tic-tac-toe.html.

January Challenge #8: Burbs

Last year, casual games were all the buzz. Everyone was talking about getting into the casual market. Casual this, casual that.

Now casual is last year's news.

Social games are the new casual games. Social this, social that.

Except, upon examination, there's not a lot of social to be found in the social games. They are, for the most part, single-player games with a few features to aid viral marketing. They mostly live on social network sites, but that doesn't make them social any more than Darksiders is a retail chain game because I bought it at Game Stop.

So how do you make an actual social game? I've been thinking about that for a bit. What is a social game? By definition, it needs to involve more than one player, or there's no social. Duh. They also seem to be an outgrowth of casual games, that is, not aimed at the hardcore gamers. Play for a few minutes, that was fun, done now. Importantly, I think there needs to be meaningful interaction between players of some sort. One-on-one basketball is a real world social game. Two people shooting hoops on opposite baskets on the same court is social, but not much of a game.

Multiplayer. Casual. Meaningful interaction. Doesn't sound too hard until you start thinking about how to be casual and still have meaningful interaction. Are we still casual if we have to arrange a time in advance to play online? Maybe for two or three or even four people, but how about twenty? Forty? Somewhere in there, it stops being casual and turns into planning a WoW raid.

So let me toss one more descriptor into the mix: asynchronous.

Most if not all social games live on social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook is an asynchronous social platform. It allows users to interact at different times, spread out as they are across the global village. It's an amazingly successful model, so why not build on that idea? What kind of game can be created to allow players to interact meaningfully within the context of the game and yet not need to be playing at the same time?

To serve as an example, I present to you Burbs. Think of it as collaborative SimCity. Each player takes control of a neighborhood, zone, borough, suburb (see what I did there), or whatever within a larger municipal entity. Players make decisions about how their burb is developed, such as zoning and density, public works, schools, markets, police funding, community support, etc... These decisions directly and immediately affect primary metrics concerning their burb's pollution, happiness, and crime rate.

The meaningful interaction comes when other players are making their decisions. A given burb can be connected to other burbs in a number of different ways. The most intuitive, and most tightly bound together, is geographic connection. The two burbs are directly adjacent; citizens can freely walk from one burb to the next, and so can police, criminals, traffic, pollution, community organizations, etc...

So if you build a library, nearby burbs will also reap a somewhat reduced benefit from it. It works in reverse as well. If you make a bad decision that increases the crime in your burb, surrounding burbs will also suffer. Or it can be somewhat more complex. Building a police station will reduce crime in your burb but may drive criminals into neighboring burbs.

The game population could occupy a single massive game universe, a megapolis of gigantic proportions, or be split into smaller game worlds representing smaller cities, but aside from technical restrictions, this isn't really all that important, as the "map" of the city would be completely abstracted, allowing for any number of burbs to participate and potentially neighbor any other.

There are plenty of other ways for burbs to be connected. A burb zoned residential can be a bedroom community for burb zoned industrial. If the player of the industrial burb does a good job of attracting good employers, the player of the residential burb will benefit from high housing demand. If the residential burb can't build housing fast enough, the industrial burb may suffer a labor shortage.

Two burbs can decide to link by rail, enabling easy transportation of people but not pollution or other largely stationary features. Two or more burbs can cooperate on a highway project, or jointly fund a homeless outreach program.

The players need to have a lot of interesting choices. Making some choices of more benefit to the individual player and other choices of more benefit to the larger community unless a threshold number of players participate introduces a flavor of the prisoner's dilemma. As in any good game design, optimal strategies should be avoided. Collaborative and competitive playstyles should be supported, and maybe even griefers can be made useful as a part of the landscape. The real world has crooked politicians and other malevolent actors, why not here?

So that's the multiplayer part. How about the asynchronous part?

When a player takes an action, there are immediate first order effects on their burb. A player has a limited number of actions that can be taken in a period of time. This number might be affected by development choices, such as building an extensive bureaucracy, or by buying action tokens at the micropay store. (Hey, social games are already doing some things right. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.)

Once every predefined period of time, say 24 hours (or 25 hours or some other odd time so that everyone around the world is periodically inconvenienced rather than players in one region all the time), the game will "tick". That is, all relevant game variables are accounted, all second order effects of player choices calculated, and a new game state created.

This allows all participants to spend their actions at their own pace throughout the day and deal with the impact of other player actions on the next. Rinse and repeat.

Obviously, there are a huge number of additional considerations to be made before this could form even the most rudimentary game design document, but I think the seeds of an actual social game have been sewn here. What do you think?

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-8-burbs.html.

January Challenge #7: Wall of Text

I had a couple special bullets in the old six shooter for when I just couldn't think of what to write this month. I was hoping not to have to use one this early in the month. It means I may have to use of them twice or come up with another one. In the section of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning I referenced on Jan 1st about Morning Pages, Hunt encourages the reader to write daily, no matter how good, just write. He gives an example of a guy who resolutely wrote the same sentence over and over again until he noticed, several days into the exercise, that other ideas were beginning to creep into his pages. I'm not planning to try precisely that trick. A long time ago, I payed a bit with stream of consciousness writing, but I found it really hard while writing longhand. Since then, I've discovered that words flow more easily for me on the keyboard than in longhand, but I haven't gone back stream of consciousness since that discovery. Those of you familiar with the style have probably already noted that I'm not really sticking to the pure form, taking the effort to actually form real sentences. But aside from that, I'm just typing whatever drivel happens to occur to me. Maybe I'll produce something worthwhile, maybe I'll make progress building a habit of writing, making occurences of "I have no idea what to write" more rare, maybe I'm just banging on my keyboard. Meh, whatever. I'm also taking the time to edit my spelling, and sometimes grammar, as I go, and when I'm done, before I post, I'll go back through and look for items to mark with relevant links. I've had plenty of people ask me why I do that, and about as many compliment me for doing it. It's one of the things I really like about hypertext, and I've written enough hypertext that it's just habit by now. Heck, I list hypertext on my resume under Technical Writing. It's a handy device when trying to maintain a tone or rhythm in your writing, not having to break out into asides to explain a topic that not all your readers will get. It makes for optional supplementary material for the reader. Knowledgeable readers don't need to follow the link unless they're curious, and topical novices can get valuable background info. If they even choose to click it. I've also gotten comments from people who complain that I've written over their head and either didn't think to click the link or just assumed that it would point to something else they wouldn't understand. I don't get that. I guess that sort of reader just isn't in my target audience. My journalism teacher also didn't care for it, but she and I really butted heads over a number of things. I list AP style on my resume, also under Technical Writing, but I find writing in that style pure torture, even worse than writing for military documentation, (you guessed it) also on my resume under Technical Writing. The military writing style is aimed at a 4th grade reading level. That's right 4th grade, and it's less torturous to write than AP style. The AP style strikes me as assuming that the reader is automatically an idiot and has to be coaxed through the piece with short hypersimplified sentences. I have an average sentence length of 26 words last I checked. I like complex sentence structures that require the reader to pay attention. Writing 6-10 word sentences preferred in AP makes the inside of my skull itch. OK, that's all I had to say about that, so we now return to our regularly scheduled wall of text. As I was saying above, this piece doesn't conform to the standard form of stream of consciousness, and I'm also employing elements of the wall of text form, which is generally considered bad form, as it ignores niceties of paragraph structure or even decent document design. It rambles on and on. Used appropriately though, I see it as the descendant of stream of consciousness. Not that it gets used properly most of the time. Wall of text is typically employed by writers who really don't know how to assemble an essay or a document of any sort, don't know how compartmentalize their text flow or move through their topic in reasonable chunks with a logical flow of ideas. Not that I really consider myself particularly proficient as an essayist. It's a style that I aspire to, but my skill in writing is mainly limited to technical writing, though even that is held back by my love of convoluted sentence structure. I've been asked if that originated in reading Marx, who wrote in the seriously convoluted style popular among German essayists of the late Eighteenth Century. I've read him, but my style really started to emerge much earlier than that. As far back as middle school, my English teachers have commented on my longer than average sentence length, though only my journalism professor in college really complained. I didn't get to Marx until early college. Maybe he had impact, but I really doubt it. I'm starting to wonder just how far I can really push this exercise. Even now, it's starting to get a little meta. That's probably not as helpful as it could be, but it did give me another bit to hyperlink. No no, now we're getting recursive. Time to stop.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-7-wall-of-text.html.

January Challenge #6: New Job Day 2

Microsoft is a big believer in crucible-style OJT. Either you spin-up fast or you flounder and flail a while. This new contract is thus far no exception, but after 3 months at home studying and job hunting, it's a welcome challenge.

Going shopping with the boss was an interesting digression from the normal routine at a big company like Microsoft. We went shopping Man-Style: tools, hardware, cabling. Oh yeah, cabling. Three different employees at Frye's grappled desperately with our cabling requirements. Damn funny. And the pushy sales floor guy who did nothing helpful but poked through our basket so he could write up a sales slip to try and claim a commission? It was very satisfying to toss his little piece of fiction in the trash before checking out.

You know those super-heavy servers of yesteryear, the ones that are seriously obsolete but every company has at least one grinding away in the NOC? Got to play with one of those today, and by "play with" I mean lug it from the 4th floor of one building to the 4th floor of the next building over, yank out one just like it that's not working, install it in place, run some tests, make a config change that I bet would have fixed the other one, lug said other one back to the 3rd floor of the building where I started, and try explaining to the admin assistant that the disintegrating packaging it's in was like that when we got it. Not what I thought I'd be doing today.

But I think the topper of the day was my first time taking apart an Xbox devkit. Before I go any further, read this comic. "Alternative means of entry" is right. These things are seriously not intended to come apart once assembled. Don't be fooled by the Youtube videos of retail Xbox disassembly. Devkits are another beast. There's one step that requires seven tabs to be simultaneously depressed and another step where you have to depress a tab obscured behind two layers of solid plastic, all the while with an extra module dangling by a relatively fragile do-not-break-this-or-you're-screwed-I-fricking-mean-it connector (that doesn't disconnect btw). I've invented a new term for this sort of hardware design: One-Way Engineering.

I got it back together and working. I'm pretty happy about that. Later this week I have forty more coming. Guess what. Rinse & repeat. w00t

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-6-new-job-day-2.html.

January Challenge #5: All Fun & Games. OK, All Games Anyway.

I totally lucked out on my first game job straight out of school. I got to start out my game career in exactly the sub-field I was aiming at, gameplay programming. As part of the game team, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with designers and artists to design and implement rules, interface, and player experiences. But all good things must come to an end, and this one-year contract eventually ran out.

Next goal: get another awesome gameplay programming job. I polished up and circulated my resume. I went grinding for business cards at PAX. I lined up interviews.

Lightning did not strike twice.

As any of you who were job hunting in 2009 can tell me, it's a tough labor market right now. From what I hear from colleagues, I performed above average just getting interviews, even if none of them panned out. Three months later, my mandatory break from contracting at Microsoft is up, and I'm back at work at a new job.

From the long perspective, I got a good one, a solid skill and resume builder. By the time I'm done, my existing time on the tech bench will be supplemented with Xbox hardware experience, I will have crafted a solid library of C++ and C# code, I'll have more XDK experience, I'll have good resume bullets in automated testing and test driven development, I'll have learned a ton about optical data formats, and I'll have experience in tools development. In all, it will be a great boost to my engineering credentials.

From the shorter perspective, it's just not as awesome as gameplay programming. I don't get my name in the credits of a hot new game. I don't get to put a notch in my belt for when I'm asked what games I've shipped by some recruiter who doesn't know any other way to measure achievement in the games industry. Worst of all, I'm not actually working on a game.

I understand that what I'm working on is damn important. Without the infrastructure on which game experiences are delivered, there would be no games industry, whether that infrastructure is print publishing, commercial shipping, Internet communications, or Xbox optical drives.

And the work is awesome compared to most of what I've done for a living in the past, including military service, retail sales, and telephone tech support. I'll still be programming and growing my existing skill base with software development experience. In the long run, my resume will be stronger with this "Pay Your Dues" job than with another gameplay programming job.

There's a lesson here, one that I knew was coming and that more aspiring game developers need to have driven home. I already knew that a game job wouldn't be just playing games all day. I have too much real world professional experience to have thought that for over a decade. More recently, I've learned that a game job won't necessarily be making games all day.

A lot of aspiring game developers have yet to learn the first lesson, and when they learn it, many give up on their dream. That's OK. If you want to maximize your game playing time, get a decent paying job that doesn't require much overtime, and play lots of games.

For the ones that stick with it, that second lesson hits like a hammer blow.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-5-all-fun-games-ok.html.

January Challenge #4: Jingoism

The term jingoism is mainly used in the context of nationalism, but I frequently use it in other contexts. I like the flavor of the word. If you know what it means, it almost can't help but imply an accusation of bigotry without saying it outright. Of course nine times out of ten, when I use the word, I get a blank stare or the online equivalent. "lolwut?" So much for impact.

Gaming seems to arouse jingoism in both players and developers. Being a gaming jingoist doesn't mean just having a favorite game or genre. That's just knowing what you like, loyalty perhaps. Nor is it simply defending your favorite game or genre when it's attacked in discourse. That equates more to patriotism than jingoism, to keep the metaphors consistent.

Gaming jingoism is when you attack games or genres that don't happen to be your favorite or the players who play them or the developers who make them. "MMOs/RPGs/FPSs/RTSs r teh suxxors!!1! ur stupid if u play them!" Translate that to your language of choice. If you've said or typed this in any seriousness, you were being a jingoist. A bigot, not to mince words.

I want to think that it goes without saying that there's room for every kind of game and gamer in our big fun-loving community and marketplace, but apparently it can't go without saying. It needs to be said more often.

Before you think I'm just being holier-than-thou and trying to preach from on high, realize that I do not exclude myself from needing to hear this message. People who know me in real life may have heard me spout something I call Dave's First Law and its corollary.

Dave's First Law
People are retarded.
Corollary to Dave's First Law
Dave is no exception.

Case in point: I don't like FPS games. I don't find them immersive, and I don't find persuasive the argument that the camera locked inside the avatar's skull encourages immersion. Without making a whole thing of it, I've held the M16 and I've kicked in the door, and FPS games not only don't convey the same experience, they don't convey anything even close to the same experience. In the real world, you maintain 360-degree awareness that can't be simulated by a camera angle locked to your avatar's facing. In the real world, you have a natural sense of scale that is nearly impossible to attain in a game perspective where you can't see your avatar's body.

Know how to solve these two criticisms? Give the player complete camera control, or at least back it off by about five feet. Suddenly, you have a greater sense of scale and immediate surroundings, but guess what. It's not a FPS game anymore.

So yeah, I think FPS games are stupid. And I've attacked them in Internet and face-to-face discourse, been a gaming jingoist, a bigot. I forget at times that there's room in our community and marketplace for every type of game and gamer.

I'll remind you if you'll remind me.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-4-jingoism.html.

January Challenge #3: MMO Design: STEEP

Say what you like about Ernest Gary Gygax, there is no denying that the man was an idea hamster. Good or bad, he just kept churning out games. A lot of his stuff may seem a little dated now, and a lot of his games were almost unworkably complex, but if you take the time to read them, there are tons of really great ideas buried in his prose.

Many of these ideas ultimately owe their genesis to the drama between Gygax and TSR in the 80s and 90s. Without diving into the whole sordid scenario, after Gygax left TSR, the company repeatedly sued over his efforts to publish RPGs, citing trademark or other intellectual property infringement. To minimize exposure to this tactic in later works, Gygax frequently departed from the established vocabulary of RPGs. In working in a new word-space, he turned out the occasional gem, and the unfamiliar terms could spark something in the reader.

In an effort to avoid the word "level" as much as possible, Gygax created the term STEEP in Dangerous Journeys. STEEP stands for Study, Training, Education, Experience, and Practice. I was disappointed to find that none of this made its way into the skill progression mechanics. To advance in skill, Heroic Personas spent Accomplishment Points to raise their Traits and Knowledge/Skill Areas. (See what I mean about departures in vocabulary?) But the idea stuck with me as I continued to read different RPG systems over the years.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I moved through college to the military to manufacturing to technical school to the defense industry to public education and finally to game development. On the way through these environments, I ran across a wide array of different methods of getting knowledge into your head, but they all came down to some combination of study, training, education, experience, and practice.

How does this relate to MMO design? In an earlier post, I complained about Trainers in MMOs. They're nothing but a store in which you spend money, experience points, or some other expendable resource on new and improved abilities. They're one-dimensional and boring.

In the "perfect" MMO in my head, there are three to seven ways to do anything. Want a particular sword? You should be able to buy it from a vendor, commision it from a craftsman, buy it from the player economy, forge it yourself, steal it from the castle armory, beat up goblins til it drops, or go to the developer's micropay store and spend $1.25 to have it magically appear in your inventory. The same applies to character advancement. There should be several different ways to learn new abilities or get better at existing ones.

Study. This is the basic way we ordinary schlubs in the real world know to extend our knowledge, by hitting the books. In-game, this can be represented by a few different systems. In EVE Online, skill advancement is going on all the time in the background, as long as you have specified a skill for study. The assumption is that your character is burning the idle time inherent to interstellar travel in a good book. It has its weaknesses, notably that time in combat counts just as much as time spent logged out in spacedock.

Logging out in an appropriate library should provide some resource points to be spent into various relevant skills upon logging in. World of Warcraft and City of Heroes already have a similar abstraction in the form of a XP multiplier for time spent logged out. Time spent studying a manual of style should provide resource points toward sword skill and related manuevers or abilities. This can be game-mechanized into either using the book in-play or logging out with it in your inventory.

Training. Arguably, this technique is already in use in most MMOs. Existing trainers represent exactly this, even if the underlying mechanic more resembles a store. In addition, logging out in a salle or dojo should garner resource points toward appropriate fighting or fitness skills.

Also, players should be able to train other players. Again, the boring bits like this should be handled while logged out, but two characters logged out in the same location should be able to specify that they are engaged in training one character in a skill know by the other.

Time spent logged out isn't the only way to abstract this. Spending resource points accumulated in other activities on skills to be instantly learned is an established technique. Why should I travel to a NPC trainer, when I have an accomplished practitioner of the skill in the party already? Let me buy the skill on the spot.

Plain vanilla NPC trainers can be made a little more interesting by limiting the skills they know. At lower levels, every Unarmed trainer probably knows the basic Boot to the Head skill, but I would expect travel to a far away land or at least scale mountain to the monastery to learn Hanam's Flying Backspin Kick to the Temple.

Education. Education is admittedly very similar to Training, so the mechanics might be similar or identical. Schools, colleges, academies, study halls, and their like are staples of high fantasy or any genre featuring a civilized setting. These might be places to logout to earn resource points, storefronts to spend your resource points on instaskills or something less usual.

To make these settings more interesting, make them quest hubs that grant abilities as quest rewards instead of resource points to spend elsewhere. The quest NPC spouts flavor text about the ability in question, gives the PC some simple tasks to make the player use simple version of the ability and then grants a more challenging task, rewarding the final version of the ability at the end.

Experience. We all know Experience Points, the resource points of character advancement. These points are earned in doing things the developers consider worthy of advancement and are spent learning new stuff, whether explicitly by using them to buy abilities a la carte, or implicitly by accumulating until a new experience level is gained, opening the gate to greater abilities.

Many games feature other advancement schemes revolving around using a particular skill, the real-world definition of experience. Each time a skill is used, it's noted in the database. On whatever schedule, accumulated skill uses are checked, and skill points are possibly awarded.

In cases where a game features iterative version of a skill, such as Fireball 1 through Fireball 25, uses of a skill should count toward learning the next iteration. Once I've cast Fireball 14 x number of times, I should have some form of credit toward Fireball 15.

Practice. Practice is a grey area. It's somewhere between experience and training. Practice under the watchful eye of a master verges into training. Practice under stressful conditions verges into experience. Should time spent thwacking a target dummy in the sallet count toward character skill while at the same time providing the player a chance to work out combos of queued attacks and maybe tweak their tray layouts? If so, it should count less than thwacking orcs that are fighting back.

In a future post, I'll suggest an even fruitier system, integrating combat skills with the player economy. Stay tuned.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-3-mmo-design-steep.html.

January Challenge #2: MMO Design: Ding!

There are lots of things I don't like about modern MMO character advancement schemes; single-metric experience progression, narrowly defined sets of activities worth experience, level-gated restriction of options resulting in optimized "cookie cutter" builds... I could go on and on, and I will in future posts.

Today, I'm going to whine piteously about Trainers.

The current implementation of Trainers is a symptom of a bigger problem of Shared World design, the challenge of balancing the need to make the story more about the player's character with the fact that there are 999,999 other players to make the story about. But where designers and writers have made greater or lesser strides in quest design to address this problem, absolutely no progress has been made in the "story" of leveling up.

Every population cluster of a certain size or other importance has some guy who knows the same bag of tricks as the next schmuck in the next podunk junction up the road. The tricks of the trade for every professional specialization are so well established that every trainer knows them all, but the player characters, the guys and gals where the hammer meets the anvil, in the trenches battling evil, using these skills to pay the bills, have to trek back through the wilderness to improve Instep Stomp 3 to Instep Stomp 4.

Are we telling the story of the hero growing in power and wisdom to face his ultimate nemesis, or are we telling the story of institutionalized industrial education, where every teacher and every student is nothing but a replacable cog in a factory that produces warrior drones for the war effort?

(Actually that second option sounds kinda interesting, if the rest of the game were also designed to support the story.)

Yeah, I get the idea of training under a master of a given skill. That's classic Campbell. Visit the wise/ancient/magical/divine man/woman/mentor/spirit/master to learn an epic/magical/chi/secret ability/skill/spell/stunt unavailable to the average mortal in order to overcome the challenges ahead of you. Studying the master's works is likewise part and parcel of the adventure genre.

"You are using Bonetti's Defense against me, ah?"
"I thought it fitting considering the rocky terrain."
"Naturally, you must suspect me to attack with Capa Ferro?"
"Naturally... but I find that Thibault cancels out Capa Ferro. Don't you?"
"Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa... which I have."
- Westley and Inigo, The Princess Bride

But that's not what we're getting here. Fred the Fighter Trainer and Alexa the Arcane Trainer know the same abilities taught by Freda the Fighter Trainer and Alex the Arcane Trainer the next town over. Yawn.

But my big gripe, the one it really comes down to, is that all this means that the player characters will forever be playing second fiddle. And they're not just playing second fiddle to a great hero with an epic backstory and a cool name that players can't emulate. (I'm looking at you, Blizzard. I want a surname.) No, they're playing second fiddle to faceless cogs in a stupidly boring simulation of production-line education.

No matter how epic I ever become, I will never be the one pushing the boundaries of what's possible in my vocation. I can never master the complexities of Cloud of Retch Gas 16 without a tutor, no mater how many times I cast Cloud of Retch Gas 15 or how many dire troglodytes are left helplessly puking by my arcane might.

Complaining without offering a solution is a waste of tears, and I have a proposal. It's a rough proposal that would take a lot hammering to make even remotely workable, but nothing worth doing is easy. Tune in tomorrow.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-2-mmo-design-ding.html.

January Challenge #1: Getting Back On the Hobby Horse

After two months without any entries, it's clear I've fallen off the hobby horse. In the past, lapses like this have led me to just give up until a couple years later I would give it another shot. Not this time.

Immediate action: Get back in the saddle. It's all about building a habit set. It's OK to fail, but don't let it end there.

Additional motivation comes from Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking & Learning. On his advice, I've been working to identify and balance my Linear-mode and Rich-mode thinking. Among the techniques he suggests is Morning Pages, a technique involving daily writing, first thing in the morning, at least three pages, long hand, no censoring.

I like the regularity of Morning Pages, the challenge to do it every day, but I'm not a big fan of writing long hand. I discovered years ago that words flow more easily for me through the keyboard than through the pen. I also like its lack of self-censoring. "Whether it's brilliant or banal, just let it out." I'm also not excited about adding another To-Do to my morning routine. Knowing myself, it sounds like planning to fail. I get the reasoning, but I'm skipping that part anyway.

Hunt also suggests that writing for a public audience is a good way to crystallize your thoughts. It makes you think about and formalize your ideas, epiphanies, and beliefs.

So I'm challenging myself to make a blog entry every day of January 2010. Genius or gibberish, write something, anything. I have a few topics in seed, sketch, or note form in my pocket notebook, another technique I'm nurturing on Hunt's advice, and I'll probably natter on about a few other things I've found in his books. I don't promise anything good, but I do promise something.

Stay tuned.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-1-getting-back-on.html.