New Rule

[Warning: Rant Forthcoming] The extra credit assignment I posted last week was a mysteriously unqualified failure. Not a single student submitted a ruleset. When discussing this with Brenda, we were both scratching our heads to try and understand why no one bothered even to submit a half-assed idea. All I asked for was two typed pages of rules; I can punch out a ruleset that long in fifteen minutes. It was hardly a taxing assignment, nor was it ill-publicized. So why the total apathy?

One theory Brenda hazarded was that students were unfamiliar with the rules of Chess. This concept astonished me. Number one: if anyone doesn’t know the basic rules of Chess (and there are… let me see… twelve. Twelve rules total.) five minutes on Wikipedia would solve your problem. And Number two: what aspiring game designer worth his or her salt doesn’t know how to play Chess?

There are a handful of board and card games termed ‘classic,’ meaning they’ve been around in an established, immutable form for at least a century. These games are not merely games, and they’re not important simply because they are old. They are important because they are forces of history. Chess, Go, Shogi… these are world-changing games. Go has been played in China and Japan in its present-day manifestation for millennia. Emporers and warlords studied it. Treaties have been signed or broken over games of Go. In 1972, American Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer defeated Russian-French grandmaster Boris Spassky in chess match dubbed “The Match of the Century.” The duel with and subsequent defeat of the Soviet titan was important enough to alter the course of the Cold War. A chess match changed the course of history! When’s the last time you heard of a video game altering world events? Even Pong, progenitor of the video game itself, was nothing but an American fad. It was the computer it ran on that became powerful, not the game.

These games are canon. They are The Fundamentals, the ancient legacy of games as tangible forces of human interaction. No one calling themselves a game designer, aspiring game designer, or game design student can rightly do so without knowing these games. Knowing of them is not the same thing. Games are their rules; they are knowable only through play. “Know your roots” does not mean know the NES. These are your roots. These are the pillars of game design, the ancestral foundation upon which all our modern efforts at game design are built.

Tags: Game Criticism, Schoolwork // 1 Comment »

My entry for this weeks Game Design Challenge, conceived by James Portnow and hosted on the Game Career Guide. View the full description of this week’s challenge - “Design a WWII shooter.”

WWII Game – Croix de Lorraine

Selling points:
Bold new perspective on the conflict
Rich urban environments
Unique guerilla missions and level design
Strong female protagonist!

The game takes place in occupied Paris beginning in the early months of 1940 and continuing through the rise and fall of the Vichy Regime and the Nazi occupation of central France. Players take the roll of a young French woman, mother of a small child whose husband is killed during the opening moments of the game. Forced to flee for her life, our heroine is harbored by and eventually inducted into La Résistance. Divided into three “Acts,” the story and level progression follows thus:

Act 1: Paris Brûle (Paris is Burning)
Our heroine witnesses the horrible death of her husband and many of her neighbors at the hands of the invading Nazi armies. As the shells fall and the city shatters around her, she must flee through the ruined streets, scavenging supplies and weapons from fallen foes and friends alike. To add to her desperation, her young daughter, Cloë, travels with her. Teetering between numb shock and violent hysteria, Cloë must be constantly protected and tended to. [Level Design — Opportunities abound for HL2 or Thief-like sneak missions that require the player to traverse an area with Cloë at their side, trying to keep her calm and quiet and avoid attracting attention. Think missions with extremely scarce weapons – a pistol with three rounds, for example – that require environmental ingenuity to complete.] Act 1 concludes when our heroine and her daughter are found and smuggled into the underground by French freedom fighters.

Act 2: Défense de la France
Cloë is safe and our heroine burns with the desire for vengeance. Taking up arms with La Résistance, she trains in guerilla tactics [Design: think character customization, fitting out our heroine with skills in different categories: knife fighting, riflery, explosives, safecracking, codes and radio espionage, escape artist, etc.] and joins gangs of freedom fighters in daring raids and hit-and-run battles with Nazi forces throughout the city [Level Design — Endless great options for rich levels depicting ruined Paris, and a wide variety of challenges and opponents: small bands of infantry, armored columns , VIP guard details, Nazi warehouses, etc. Opportunities for villain characters – brutal Nazi taskmasters who hunt down resistance fighters, kidnap them, or hold them hostage. Think arch-nemeses for our heroine and missions based on thwarting them.]

Act 3: La Libération
The Normandie invasion has succeeded and Allied forces are pushing inland. The Vichy regime is crumbling and the city is in chaos. The Paris Résistance joins the effort with other bands in the newly formed French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and the final stage begins. Now our heroine finds herself a soldier in pitched battles, part of an elite squad created to undertake the most difficult and critical missions: stealing codebooks, sabotaging Nazi convoys and airfields, pathfinding for Allied advances, breaking Allied prisoners out of Nazi camps and escorting them to safety, etc. [Level Design – again, plenty of rich environments around the French countryside, small towns, prison camps, and of course, Paris. Scale of the game grows from the more intimate, four-man team missions to larger battles with hundreds of combatants.] Act 3 and the game conclude with the Allied liberation of Paris.

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Introduction: In Starshower, players compete to cover the board with stars and patterns, but they may not always be able to call their shots. Each turn you have a chance to hit or miss, and if you miss you could find yourself ruining the very patterns you so carefully created. But even in despair there is hope… the clever player can turn their misfortune around and use it against their opponents.

Players: 2+

Materials:

• One sheet of standard, letter-sized (A4) paper.
• Pens or markers of different colors, one per player.
• One black pen or marker.
• One coin.

Setting Up: Using the black pen, make a grid of even-sized spaces on the paper at least ten lines in width and height (it may be denser as players see fit). Lay the sheet in the center of the table and distribute the colored pens or markers to each player. Roll off to see who goes first; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: The goal of the game is to establish the greatest presence on the board before all grid points are filled. Players take turns trying to add stars of their color while avoiding drawing or being trapped by black stars. On their turn, player first flip the coin and call their toss. If they are correct they may draw a good star, but if they are wrong they must draw a black star. The pre-existing placement and timing of stars limits where new stars may be drawn, as described below.

Good Stars: Good stars are simply stars drawn in a player’s color that help that player score points. Each live star is worth one point at the end of the game on its own, but stars may also be formed into groups that count double. Groups are defined as three or more stars in a line that the player encircles. In addition to being worth extra points, groups are also invulnerable to black star groups (see below).

To create a group, the player first draws a star that forms or adds to a line of three or more, then draws a loop around the line of stars. Note that this means the player must use the star they added that turn in the new group! Players may not create groups from pre-existing lines of stars unless they add to it that turn. Groups may be any size the player chooses, but they must be linear (horizontal or vertical, not diagonal) and can only enclose stars of the player’s color.

Black Stars: If the player misses the coin toss, they must draw a black star instead of a good star. Black stars may be drawn on any open grid point and do not count for any points. Additionally, black star groups may be formed that kill existing stars or prevent new ones from being drawn. Similar to creating a good star group, black star groups are created by connecting a line of grid points between two black stars. To create a group, the player draws a black star in line with an existing black star. If the grid points between them are free — contain no good star groups — the player draws a line between the two black stars. However, if some part of a good star group exists on the line, the black star group may not be formed: it is blocked by the good star group’s invulnerability.

Any good stars that exist on points along this line are killed – they are no longer worth points and may not be used to form groups. Furthermore, no new stars may be drawn on points on this line, good or black. Black stars already on the line are unaffected.

Winning the Game: Play continues until all grid points are filled or unplayable (blocked by black star groups). Ungrouped live good stars are worth one point each. Grouped live good stars are worth two points each. The player with the highest score wins.

Next: Designing “Starshower:” (more…)

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I saw this post on King Lud IC and the link to this article about Chinese MMO ZT Online, now infamous for its monetization scheme and systematic player exploitation. This is truly something incredible. Reading the story of Lu Yang and her journey into the underworld that is ZT Online’s digital economy is like reading the epic saga of struggle against ancient evil — harrowing, awe-inspiring, and moving. For anyone interested in MMOs and virtual worlds, this is a must-read. If you can see this and not recoil at the thought of American MMOs adopting such systems, I will be shocked and horrified.

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I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen or heard people scorn Sudoku because, as they claim, “I’m no good at math.” Similarly, I can’t recall how many times I’ve tried to convince these people that there is no math required to play Sudoku. It’s a logic puzzle. Granted, calculation of probabilities and patterns of elimination is mathematical, but this type of number crunching does not happen in the conscious mind. Logic puzzles do not “smack of math,” in a manner of speaking. No sums required.

What Sudoku represents is the incredible power of premise to alter the way players approach games. People look at a grid of numbers and they think “math.” And as most people older than fifteen are not accustomed to doing elementary math in their everyday life, they recoil. Intelligent, sophisticated thinkers I have met swear off Sudoku almost on principle. They will not even attempt to play a puzzle — I can only assume due to the conviction that they will not win, and that in the process of losing their mathematical incompetence will embarrass them, but even that is remarkable. There’s something to the idea of mathematical ability that carries a stigma of mental fitness, something unique and strangely powerful.

Consider crossword puzzles — far more popular despite their similar structure. Because people do pay attention to language and culture and use them every day, they do not fear them. No one recoils from a crossword. They may feel it is too hard, they make take a laissez-faire attitude towards participation with it, but even the most apathetic are usually still willing at least to look at it and try to solve what clues they can. They play despite their conviction that they will not win. There is something approachable about crossword puzzles — people engage with them readily and without any embarrassment if they cannot find the answer. Clearly, something is going on in the mind of these players that speaks to the fundamental difference between crosswords and Sudoku. There is a barrier to entry to Sudoku that has nothing to do with the puzzle. It’s in the premise.

To prove my point there is non-numerical Sudoku. Take Character Sudoku on the network website for USA (the cable channel): you place colored tiles with bobble-head portraits of the stars of their various shows into a Sudoku puzzle. Would an otherwise reticent Sudoku player find this more approachable? Undoubtedly. No numbers means no fear of math, however unfounded that fear is. Freed from the premise and all the assumptions and mindsets that accompany it, Sudoku is completely transformed while remaining exactly the same. I intend to undertake an experiment: whenever someone complains that they hate Sudoku because they hate math, I’m going to get them to try Character Sudoku and see how they react.

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This challenge is for students in Brenda’s current Game Design Criticism and Analysis class, but if any non-SCAD readers feel particularly inspired, you’re welcome to post your ideas to this topic.

Task: Reinvent Chess

Description: For this project, you must write a ruleset for a new board game that only uses chess paraphernalia. This is not a mod: you may not create a game whose win condition is equal or similar to that of chess, nor may you retain any of the traditional rules of chess (note that this also precludes you from using rules from chess variations). Treat the playing pieces as an arbitrary set and act as if chess does not exist.

Requirements:

• Game must use only chess paraphernalia. This means the only playing pieces available are those included in a regulation chess set (four rooks, four bishops, four knights, two kings, two queens, sixteen pawns, and one 8×8 black-and-white tile board) — no dice and no cards. However, you may include supplementary paper information, such as ability lists or stat sheets. Note: your design does not need to use all the pieces in a regulation chess set, but it cannot use more those found in one regulation set.
• Game rules cannot incorporate any of the standard rules of chess. Note that this means you can make rules that are similar: pieces that move, capturing, victory by entrapment, etc., but they cannot be precisely the same as in chess.
• Game rules must be no longer than two typed pages, single-spaced.
• Game rules must follow the format of the Simple Sundays designs on this blog. That means you must enumerate number of players, materials, setup procedure, turn procedure, special rules (if applicable), and win condition (see SS page for examples). Additional sections may be added as you see fit, just be sure the rules are complete. You will not have the chance to explain the game! It must be playable as written.

Any questions, please post a comment so others can view the response. Good luck, and have fun!

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Introduction: Word games can be a bit much for those who are weak in the knees when it comes to the mother tongue. But if you’re light on your feet, quick as a whip, and can keep your cool while others are all over the place, you’ll be in the gravy while your opponents are scraping the barrel. Careful, though: don’t count your chickens before they hatch or you’ll find your score is just a house of cards. Keep your head up and take no prisoners and you’ll be right as rain. Get my drift?

Players: 2+

Materials:

• Pens or markers of different colors, one per player.
• One sheet of standard, letter-sized (A4) paper.
• Several smaller sheets of scrap paper, one per player, for scorekeeping.
• A stopwatch or timer capable of measuring one minute.

Setting Up: Lay the sheet in the center of the table and distribute the pens or markers to each player. Roll off to see who goes first; play proceeds to the left. Beginning with the first player, each player takes turns writing a letter on the sheet of paper. Players may write any letter they choose, one letter per turn. Letters should be kept to a modest size, though there is no restriction as long as room remains to add more letters. Each player should write their letters so that they can read them — do not conform all letters to the same orientation. Continue until each player has taken ten turns and written ten letters.

How to Play: The goal of the game is to create the most elaborate words and phrases from the letters on the board before they are all used up. Once the board has been populated with letters, players take turns attempting to create words and phrases from the letters on the board. On their turn, players create words by marking the letters they wish to use. However, each letter may only be used three times during the game. When using a letter, mark it as follows to indicate its status:

1. The first time a letter is used, the player who chose it draws a circle around it.
2. The second time a letter is used, the player draws a line across the circle.
3. The third time a letter is used, the player draws a second line perpendicular to the first, forming an ‘X.’ The letter is now crossed out, and may not be used again by any player for the remainder of the game.

Players may make only one word per turn, and they have one minute, measured by the timer, to do so. When they have chosen a word, they mark the letters they are using and write the word on their score sheet. If they cannot form a word by the end of one minute, their turn is ended and the next player may begin. Players may elect to pass their turn if they choose.

Words and Phrases: Words are worth points equivalent to the square of the number of letters in the word (a 3-letter word is worth 9 points, a 4-letter word is worth 16, and so on). However, players may form phrases from the words on their score sheet, as long as the phrase is an English idiom. Phrases such as “rise and shine” or “all ears” or “last laugh” are all examples of English idioms, as are all the italicized phrases in the Introduction above. If a player has the words to form an idiom, the combination is scored separately from the words that compose it (for example, “all ears” would be worth 49 points for the 7 letters in the phrase). A comprehensive dictionary of idioms can be found here.

Winning the Game: Play continues until all letters have been crossed out or all players have passed in turn. Each player scores all their words and writes out any idioms they think they have completed. Once every player has written their idioms, they read them off in turn — any idioms that seem suspect are compared against the dictionary. The player with the highest score is the winner.

Next: Designing “The Cat’s Pajamas”: (more…)

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I played WoW again the other day — it’s been nearly three years to the week that I stopped playing the first time around. I was only under the influence for about fourteen months, not counting the summertime when I didn’t have my computer. I’ve been told by many friends that the game is vastly improved with Burning Crusade, so I thought I’d give it a try. I made a Blood Elf warlock and started in…

It’s exactly the same. I didn’t last past level five. As soon as I saw that line “Gather 7 Mana Slivers and bring them here to me,” I was done.

Brenda often lambasts the game for its shallow goal/quest system — what she calls the hub and spoke mission: go here, get five of these, bring them back. Go somewhere else, get something else, bring it back. Without the ability to retain real persistence in the game world, and with the need to accommodate an unpredictable quantity of players competing against the same enemies for the same rewards, its the only basic quest structure that works for an MMO. Every MMO has them. There are no exceptions. And they all suffer for it.

Solving the problem of quest and story in an MMO is one of those big issues, the ones game developers constantly work on but have yet to solve, the ones professors use to teach their students that game design is not a walk in the park. But for all that issues like these are perpetual thorns in the minds of developers, I don’t often see them discussed. Do people assume that the problem cannot be solved? Are they content to wait until someone else has an epiphany? Or do they have good ideas but just don’t publish about it?

MMOs suffer from hub and spoke disorder, but it’s not a fatal illness. They say people only change when they’re in pain, and the entity that is MMOs is flourishing despite awkward design barnacles like this that it just can’t seem to shake. Perhaps no intervention is necessary. But as WoW’s power and influence plateaus, and new MMOs fail with startling regularity for trying to copy the WoW model and failing… the ground is being laid for an MMO revolution. What will define the basic quest of the MMO of the future?

Tags: Game Criticism, The Industry // 4 Comments »

We just watched a snippet from a Discovery series on the human body, about sight and the ways in which the mind filters out noise and extraneous detail to present you an extremely narrow packet of information about the world in front of your face. It included a scene in which the host demonstrates a patently stupid card trick: he spreads out the deck and his assistant picks one. He spreads the deck again, face-up this time, and inserts the card back in. Then he turns the deck to show that the backs have all changed color except for the card she picked. The selective camera movement was more than enough to mask the deck change, hence the stupidity of the trick. But then they pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat: it turns out that while you were watching the cards move… the tablecloth, the backdrop, and the shirts the host and assistant were wearing all changed color as well. When polled, exactly two people in the class noticed any change at all, and only the backdrop because it went from blue to red. I noticed nothing, and was genuinely flabbergasted.

The point made was that we just don’t see much of anything of what passes in front of our eyes, no matter how obvious it appears to those who do notice it. I commented to my professor that I missed 90% of the art in Gears of War — the uber-detailed normal maps and spiffy UT3 next-gen graphics that they spent so much time on. I was wowed for about two minutes, and then my mind just chunked the whole thing, washed it out, and fed me a Duplo version for the rest of the game. Oh, it perked up a bit when a cool particle effect or a new character showed up, but mostly I was content to assume that, once I’ve seen one rotting paneling texture or cement bunker wall, I’ve seen them all. So really, Epic… was it worth all that effort? By contrast, I have yet to become bored with the art in Okami. Because a word made out of brush paintings does not remotely approach visual patterns I am already familiar with, my brain is consistently interested. I “see” that game much more clearly. Which do you think is the better strategy?

Additionally, from the perspective of a designer, it’s humbling to realize that the brain works in this super-efficient filtering way, and that this applies to mechanics and dynamics as well. Think you’ve got an incredibly deep, beautifully complex system that is just gonna blow people away? Think again. For all you know, players are just washing that out the same way I washed out the art in Gears. Once again, I assert: simplicity is best. I remember little of how I played Baldur’s Gate, and nothing at all about how the underlying systems were put together, but I have a highly developed, deep understanding of the minute dynamics of Risk. Maybe that’s comparing apples and oranges, but I challenge you: take another look at the games you love, and see if you can find that 90% you’re missing. If you can, take caution: it means your brain missed it the first time around because it didn’t find it to be important.

Tags: Game Criticism, The Industry // 3 Comments »

Introduction: Grow and devour — this is your calling. In Penicillin, players take on the role of a bacteria culture, spreading with relentless, single-minded purpose to overrun their opponents and consume the board before those pesky antibodies can catch up to them.

Players: 2+

Materials:

• Pens or markers of different colors, one per player.
• One sheet of standard, letter-sized (A4) paper.
• A penny, for size comparison.

Setting Up: Lay the sheet in the center of the table and distribute the pens or markers to each player. Players take turns drawing circles on the paper, each approximately the size of a penny, with a small hash mark on their circumference — these are their starting hot spots (see below). Players may draw circles anywhere they wish as long as no circle overlaps another circle or the edge of the paper; continue until each player has drawn six circles. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: Players act in turn to grow their territory out from the circles they drew during setup, seeking to devour the growth of their opponents before antibodies consume their forces. Each circle drawn during setup represents a bacteria culture, called a hot spot. On their turn, players may make a single free action to either strengthen a hot spot, grow their culture, or attack their opponents. Once their free action is complete, players may take any number of further actions by opening their cultures to attack by antibodies (see below). Once a player has finished taking actions, their turn ends. The actions available to them are as follows:

• Strengthening Hot Spots: Strengthening hot spots means adding striking power. Each hot spot can be strengthened a maximum of five times. To strengthen a hot spot, players draw a feeler — a small hash mark extending from the circle (players are encouraged to keep the hash marks short, to keep the board from becoming cluttered and confusing). Feelers are used to make connections to other hot spots in order to grow the culture or attack opponents’ hot spots.
• Growing the Culture: Culture means influence. To expand the culture, the player draws lines between their existing hot spots. These lines must be straight, they must touch exactly two hot spots (not counting opponents’ hot spots), and the two hot spots being connected must both have an available feeler — each connection is made between two feelers, and each feeler can support only one connection (thus, each hot spot can support a maximum of five connections). Connections are made to form triangles of three hot spots and three lines. Whenever a triangle is formed (i.e. on the turn the player draws the third side) the player may immediately add a new hot spot with a single feeler anywhere inside the triangle’s area. The new hot spot must conform to the size and placement constraints as those made during setup — if there is not enough room to add a new hot spot inside the triangle, none may be drawn. Otherwise, the new hot spot will be available to be strengthened and used for growth or attack on the player’s next turn.
• Attacking Opponents: Players eliminate each other by eliminating hot spots. In the same manner as growing the culture, players draw lines to form triangles around their opponent’s hot spots. On the turn the triangle is formed, the player draws a line through the enclosed hot spots — enclosing multiple hot spots is allowed, and the player may draw lines through every hot spot they surround. Hot spots do not need to be fully enclosed to be damaged — as long as the triangle either surrounds or intersects the hot spot, it is susceptible to the attack. Each hot spot can take one hit before it dies: if the player attacks hot spots that already have been damaged (they already have one line drawn across them) they draw a second line to form an ‘X’, signifying that the hot spot is dead. Dead hot spots may not be used to form connections and are worth no points.

Antibodies: To take extra actions, a player marks their own hot spots with lines exactly as if they had been damaged by an opponent. For every damage mark they make, they may make a single further action. Note: damage does not need to be applied to the hot spot the player wishes to act on. They may damage any hot spot they control in order to take an action anywhere on the board. Players may kill their own hot spots in this way.

Winning the Game: Play continues until no more actions are possible for any player. For every live hot spot a player controls at the end of the game, they score one point. The player with the highest score wins.

Next: Designing “Penicillin”: (more…)

Tags: Game Design // 3 Comments »