Why WoW players complain so much.

This is not a very "deep" article; if you know the first thing about MMOG social dynamics, you can move on, because this is quite literally that first thing: The phenomenon of MMOG complainers. It's not an explanation of the "how", since not even the greatest minds in the industry can come up with a satisfactory answer in my opinion as to the root causes of such behavior... just the "why" this behavior manifests itself in WoW the way it does.

Never before has an MMOG reached such a mass-market. People who are very casual game-players - the console-loving "HALO crowd" for example - play WoW in droves. Many of them have never given an MMOG a second look since everquest, and most have no idea how the social dynamics of an MMOG work. So, you have a huge proportion of the players not knowing how things generally go in an MMOG community, and a huge number of players.

What all these people would know, if they played MMOs, is that the vast majority of the bitching and moaning - and basically all of the bitchy, moaning rebuttals to said bitching and moaning - is completely ignored by everyone except for other bitchy moaners. We all have bitching and moaning to get off our chest once in a while, and when it's well-thought-out, poignant, and grammatically consistent, it can maybe, just maybe, change a small piece of the game forever. Mosty of the time though, it's drowned out in the official forum's shouting matches - and raising your voice only makes you more indistinguishable from the rest.

Without the slightest veterancy in the genre, WoW players are more likely to treat the internets like Serious Business, and wax despairing over their squandered 15 dollars a month, which in the USA probably wouldn't buy enough dog food for a single dog to survive. As Penny Arcade's Tycho has often attested, the difference between free and paid-for changes the percieved entitlement a ridiculous amount in the average gamer.

So, in general the tendency is for people who don't like MMOGs to have really loud voices - remember, these people wait years for that one MMOG they think sounds the best to come out, then are expected to shell out money for as long as they shall play - and to boot, WoW players haven't learned from history, so in terms of community it's more like a sequel to EverQuest than EQ2 can ever be.

First-person shooters need more interactive environments.

And here's where you say, "You idiot, they've had interactive environments for years! If you want anything more you're just being a dreamer who isn't willing to face the harsh realities of game limitations!" Well... not quite.

We've made good progress so far, with Half-Life 2. With the Havok engine and the gravity gun, physics have been taken pretty much to their limit as far as interactive environments. Mini-games which require special input, puzzle-solving and the like are pretty much at their limit too. Take a look at something like Prey, or if you're old school something like Marathon. Rigid puzzles have been an example of the interactive environment for a long time.

But these take the avatar out of the picture. There is a strong disconnect between the player's avatar and the environment, one that has become more and more striking as the rest of the genre has fleshed out.

I was inspired to write this because of a preview video I saw of Red Steel. In it, the person trying out the game was peeking out from behind a wooden beam, trying to shoot someone at a distance, when most of the bullets just went into the beam. There was no physical way to get closer to the beam he was shooting. Could you make this kind of mistake in real life? There's a problem here. Curiously enough, the answer has been around for years and years, but everyone figured it was something that could be done a better way, if only games became (impossibly) more advanced.

And so this possibility was left to gather dust and eventually forgotten. There is a certain drive to make everything about a level as dynamic as possible to keep the players immersed. They don't want to see the exact same obvious event happen exactly the same way every single time they try to get through an area, so AI pathing and scripted story/cinematic events are concealed as much as possible, when the developers are unable to do away with them entirely. But there's one scripted thing in the levels of an FPS no one wants to get rid of, and for good reasons: the ladder.

The ladder has never been and will probably never in our lifetimes be completely a dynamic aspect of a game's physical rules except in the most rigid of contexts. In every shooter you've ever played, the ladder has an invisible aspect to it, a cleverly-disguised surface or line which is totally imperceptible to the player, but tells the game, "Treat this area of space, indistinguishable to this dumb game engine from all the space around it, like a ladder, so the player can climb it." This is the solution we've been looking for. I'm not the only one to realize this. Slip Call of Duty 2 into your XBox 360 and walk up to any low ledge away from debris. An icon appears; a button press stalls your action for two seconds as you heave yourself over. The invisible, imperceptible ladder, in horizontal form.

The method is proven; grab a Tony Hawk game and start scoring grinds and lip tricks. Obviously a decent game can be manufactured from these invisible player-environment connectors alone. So I say, next time you give a player a wooden pole, put that pole in the center of an invisible area, a small post, that tells the game, "Treat this area of space like something the player can brace his gun against." Not only will the player not fire into the pole like a retard, but in fact be more accurate and far, far more immersed.

Some say that re-iterative development can only take a genre so far. Some of those even say the FPS is dying. It's not; this is not a plea over what can save the genre. It's a prediction of the future. Like all mechanics, it will be in some popular FPS games and not others, but FPS still has an ace up it's sleeve, and it's not ready to fold just yet.

Realism in Games

Realism is often sought-after by game developers, reviewers, and players, yet poorly understood by many. A rather elementary principle that a budding game designer soon learns is, "realism doesn't necessarily help a game", yet the reasoning behind it is usually murky.

The key is not to look at realism as a value-adding aspect like graphic quality, sound fidelity, screen resolution, etc., but more as a carefully-balanced aspect like progression of difficulty or overall complexity; too little and too much are both undesirable.

The dangers of realism are a lack of fairness (or overabundance depending on how you look at it), and an overload of complexity:

Fairness:

No one wants to watch an action movie in which the hero goes up against 3 armed opponents and is lucky to inflict a single casualty before being killed. Media manipulates the acumen and luck of all parties involved to portray something fantastical; in this case realism would make the game too difficult, or, assuming the player can possibly win by taking realistic courses of action, too boring.

In Counter-Strike, we could realistically expect the Counter-Terrorists to have better munitions in more ample supply than the average Terrorist squad, as well as considerably more manpower, especially on hostage maps where the CTs have presumably had plenty of time to gather their forces and form a plan of attack. In this case, realism gets in the way of a fun competitive game by stacking the odds severely against the terrorists; after all, the goal of terrorists is to sow terror and avoid direct confrontation in order to make up for their inferior strength, and as such are almost by definition weaker than the CTs.

Complexity:

Imagine a game like Trauma Center with about 30 antibiotics and dozens of types of forceps. There's a reason that doctors spend years in school learning how to treat the human body, and as a result any game based on medicine needs to be simplified in order for a layperson to play it at all.

The same goes for flight; which is more popular, Star Fox (a.k.a. Lylat Wars outside U.S.) or all flight simulators combined? I don't even need to check the sales charts; my money's on McCloud. The reason is that the complexity of a realistic aircraft requires a person spend a great deal of time learning in order to get off the ground, let alone engage in heart-pumping combat.

The benefits of realism are immersion and common-sense mechanics:

Immersion:

Immersion is the holy grail of gaming. The reason realism is so touted, along with high-resolution 3D graphics and surround sound, is immersion. Immersion is the only thing which a mass-market game can always use more of, regardless of its nature or its genre, and so the push for realism that follows is understandable; The issue arises when more realism adds less immersion than it does unfairness and complexity.

In some rare cases, realism can reduce immersion. In a medieval game, speech from even the English would be quite difficult to make heads or tails of. Going back to counter-strike, the guns are all left-handed, even though they are used, by default, in the player's right hand. The only reason for this seems to be to show off the gun's realistic machinations, such as bullet-casing ejection - things that would go unseen if the gun were right-handed or held properly in the left hand.

Common Sense:

This point seems to be lost on many developers, and so was the inspiration for this article: realism is important to common sense. When a player first picks up a game, e is using all of eir knowledge, common sense, and perceptions to put the game into a logical context. Without this context, the game seems to make no sense, and is no fun.

Let's use Counter-Strike one last time. Let's say that for an assault rifle, the gun fails to fire every so often. Imagine two different expressions of this failure:

• The gun makes a kazoo sound and fires confetti for a few seconds.
  
• The gun jams and the cartridge is forcefully ejected by the player's avatar.

They both operate on exactly the same gameplay principles, yet the former makes little sense while the latter is perfectly understandable. When a player plays the game for the first time under the "confetti" presentation, the random failures of the gun will not make sense to the player. The player will become increasingly confused and frustrated as e attempts to explain the cause of the failures which are getting em killed so often. Unless other players in the game explain the gun's operation to the player, e will quit forever.

On the other hand, with the "jammed gun" presentation, there may be some confusion as to what causes a mechanical malfunction in the gun, but there is no confusion as to why the gun is not firing; guns do not fire confetti, they become jammed. In this case a player is far more likely to be more understanding of the situation, and is immediately closer to being fully acclimatized with the nuances of the game that need to be understood for effective and fun play.

Possible examples abound. For one, imagine a flight simulator that responds to a certain failure by instantly pointing the aircraft at the ground and teleporting it within 50 feet of the earth's surface. Even in a game emphasizing arcade-style play, such a response would only be perceived as a bug.

What to take away from this is that there are easily-understandable reasons behind why realism can be a bad thing - despite these aspects usually being acknowledged but glossed-over in much game design commentary - and that realism can help to make game rules intuitive for the player, making realism about more than immersion.

The follow-up to this post is here.

Wired Magazine / On "Gamers"

Wired Magazine's site crashes FireFox frequently. Attempt #3 is just a link to a list of other links from this guy who actually more or less knows everything he's talking about. I don't read Wired and I'm not about to start for one column, but this is good stuff.

Go read, if you care about gaming.

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Speaking of gaming, who are "gamers"? I would never call myself a gamer; would you? Most of my leisure time is spent playing games, thinking about games, talking about games, or writing about games. You might think this qualifies me as a "gamer", and I might wear this label with pride. In fact, I don't quite understand why anyone would describe eirself as a gamer. Let's think a little more deeply about this.

If you love books, you might call yourself a "reader". Yet even at first glance, we see that this word has very different connotations. There's no reader "culture" or "lifestyle" to speak of; reading is just something you do as a hobby and in no way identifies how you culturally identify yourself. You can find a T-shirt on the internet with the Konami code emblazoned on the chest quite readily. You'd be much harder-pressed to find a shirt with, say, the definition of an intransitive verb.

The same goes for movies. If I go to movies often, I'm not a "movie-goer" in a strictly cultural sense; I'm a guy who loves movies. If I like music, am I suddenly part of the "audiophile culture"? I could make up terms and shove them into quotation marks all day, but I think you get my point.

So, why "gamer"? I have a couple of ideas, and I'm going to list them from least- to most-compelling:

3. Gamers are stereotypically awkward in social situations.

I get the impression that the idea of a nerd who plays video games and has no social skills was fairly accurate in the days of ye olde gameing when compared to a sample of similar non-gamers. If those that have laid the groundwork for the culture don't get along with non-gamers, a desire for soldarity follows. Suddenly that T-shirt with the controller input for a hadoken greatly resembles the rainbow accessory for homosexuals. They're both subtle but unmistakeable declarations on the respective identities of each wearer: "Yeah, I'm one of you, and there's nothing wrong with us. I won't call you a [nerd/queer] or make a crack at how you [don't know the names of atheletes/are attracted to your own sex]; strike up a conversation."
Given that the concept of being a gamer is becoming more and more familiar to the public at large, and not many people find moral issues with games in general, this is becoming a continually less-compelling hypothesis as time goes on, but the the concept of "gamer" is growing, so we need to move further down the list to build a complete answer.

2. Gamers are competetive.

If you play games enough to wear a T-shirt with hylian text, you like winning, even if it's against an AI or just an environment. The shirt becomes a statement of acumen: "I know what this means and you don't, because I'm more 1337 h4x0r than you." The wearer of such a shirt eats up the confused stares of non-gamers. The in-joke or esoteric reference is not specific to gamers, but as far as presumably-mainstream entertainment, it is; books aren't popular enough with the young people who love to be hip and in-the-know, while movies are too popular for any joke to be very "in".
This might single-handedly explain the T-shirts, but not all the people who call themselves gamers, nor the gamer "lifestyle", which seems to amount to - aside from playing games - cursory habits, like drinking Bawls or Mountain Dew instead of Red Bull.

1. Gamers are viewed as a clearly-defined marketing segment.

This is my pet theory. Let's say you want to market something, and your target audience is less than 30, not specifically female, and - this is critical - may or may not be a party animal who likes to drink plenty of acohol and use products with "X-treme" in the name. How do you identify with and appeal to this wide, vague group? They may be 15 or 25, male or female, dull and plain or wild and always trying new things, or responsible and polite or edgy and in-your face. What can this group, from a general perspective, have in common?
Games, of course. Lots and lots of these people play games, while relatively few people outside this demographic play games. Tell them they're "gamers", and sell them "gamer" products, and they'll buy them. They'll buy them because the product is for gamers.
It's not really for gamers of course; it's for the demographic which just happens to also often play games. A high-performance network card might be desirable for someone who opens his computer to vast numbers of unconventional connections, for some information-age utility. But these people are gamers, so they sell you a gamer card. It reeks of young male rebellion, but manages to duck out of actually putting "X-treme" on the label.

So, there you have it. If you ask me, no one is actually a "gamer" per se; it's an illusory group implied-at by marketers to sell things to a demographic. There's no sin in this type of marketing; it does indeed give people the correct impression as to who would want or need the product, and so I can't pin the blame on them.

The problem arises when people who have never worked as marketers call themselves gamers, and think that it in any way defines or clarifies who they are as people. If you tell me that you're a gamer, I still know nothing about you except that you play lots of games, not all of them sports. They might even be only one kind of game; maybe you only play non-squad-based first-person shooters. There are people who have only played half a dozen games regularly at any time in their lives and call themselves gamers, because of their devotion to that half-dozen. Calling yourself a gamer means you are involved in games a lot, but it doesn't imply scopes, degrees, or qualities, so it carries very little meaning, and thus is not at al la useful term. In fact, if you go so far as to call yourself a gamer, I get the vague (though not at all definite) impression that you don't have enough interests or hobbies to be a mature person; you're not so much a "gamer" as a "loser".

Don't call yourself a gamer except to say that you play games.

On Vanity Points

"Vanity points" is a concept I touched on a while back. The idea is, in a typical game, and especially in online team games, you typically have scores, points, and awards which are not absolutely critical to victory: e.g. the numbers on the stats screen at the end of a game of WarCraft 3, or the number of kills in a capture-the-flag shooter. Usually these points do indeed imply contribution to the end result. They rarely, if ever guarantee it; in Counter-Strike, one man might die from gunshots that expose the locations of enemies to allies, who then get the kills. The dying man deserves little credit, to be sure, but he gains none; meanwhile all the credit is given to the killers. This is compounded by the fact that killing the enemy is not necessary to win a given round of Counter-Strike.

So, you might think I'm opposed to vanity points; nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I think they are critical to directing the attention of the players. A movie director or cinematographer will ensure that a concept is expressed to the audience by directing the attention of the audience. Example: if one half of the shot is a conversation far away, and the other half someone's face up close, one will plainly see the close-up character's feelings regarding the content of the distant conversation. The same goes for games with their vanity points. In Counter-Strike, one does not need to get kills to win, and yet this is the overwhelming strategy to attain wins. Thus are new players browsing the scoreboard instantly aware of the critical role that killing takes in the game, if they didn't know already.

If you got rid of the death count in Counter-Strike, would nothing happen? More likely, you'd see a small drop in camping, more aggressive charges from non-campers, and more of a tendency for unskilled players to stick with a server as their kills stagnated while their deaths skyrocketed. The death count gives the players a greater sense (impossible as it may seem) that dying is, in fact, bad.

Further, a community might get the wrong ideas in its head about how to accomplish something without the proper vanity points. In Battlefield 2, one gains points for healing and reviving players as a medic. If this was not the case, players using medics would no doubt be more combat-oriented. In this case, vanity points have influenced how players play the game, by telling the players that, in the opinion of the developers, healing and reviving is a critical action to benefit the team, just like killing; so critical, in fact, that it deserves vanity points. Thanks to vanity points and "most/best" rankings each round (i.e. "Most revives"), newbies self-tutorialize by running blindly for any dying persons they can see in order to resuscitate them. Those that learn to play properly eventually cease over-compensating and integrate the medic-specific aspects of play into the overarching game. Thus vanity points can influence a player to not only play differently, but learn how to play properly without any sort of explicit guide.

What to take away from this is that vanity points and awards are usually an incomplete and poorly-understood mechanic in the vast majority of games that employ them, but they can also be a powerful tool for influencing the flavor of your game by influencing how the community at large plays it.

On musical games

"Musical games" are henceforth defined as games where the player's input depends on rhythm, and that input is assisted/rewarded with music. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Frequency are all examples of musical games.

I have long been unable to put my finger on why I find some musical games compelling (DDR, Amplitude) and others humdrum (Beatmania). Recently I played Guitar Hero which allowed me to recognize a key difference.

OK, some background. I adore Amplitude (by Harmonix), and was greatly looking forward to Guitar Hero (also by Harmonix), only for months I didn't have enough money. Well, I go over to a friend's house, and his sister happens to own it... And it was a huge letdown. This led to a greater analysis and eventually the short essay you're reading now.

The difference is the existence of "game" mechanics. DDR's input in no way resembles a popular instrument, and missing a step does not miss the note. Amplitude has a number of tracks such that playing the entire song in real life is impossible, and to boot has a number of powerups that affect more than score. Meanwhile, other games have the logical conclusion of being able to play a complex song note for note. Guitar Hero is much the same way. These don't do it for me because one has to wonder why one doesn't simply learn to play the actual instrument.

I have and still do dabble in creating music on the computer, electric piano, harmonica, and ukulele. When I can actually produce music of my own whimsy, however humble, it is far more gratifying than performing a song well in, say, Guitar Hero. Whereas Amplitude uses music as its cornerstone and then builds game elements on top, most musical games merely use the music alone and do their best to ignore the "game" portion.

So, after I worked this out, I started wondering: Why are "performing" musical games popular? It's obvious why one might pick up and play a few times; instantly the music is better than it would be on a real instrument, so there's more feedback. But what about when you start looking like this? Why not just learn to play the piano?

The answer, I decided, is inertia. Just before writing this I saw a fascinating YTMND site, whose content was nothing more than a one-edged, one-surfaced torusoid, but what made it amazing were the comments made by users. The vast majority of comments - and there were a lot of comments - was about how amazing the shape was. I was stunned; it's an interesting shape, yes, but could so many people have never really seen such a shape and examined it?

It's inertia; People tend not to be very inquisitive. They don't bother learning about topology on their own even if, when shown a strange shape, they think it amazing. They stick with their Bemani game instead of moving on to a real instrument because it's familiar. People have a great deal of inertia.

So, this is my call to everyone reading this: KILL YOUR INERTIA. Go forth and do stuff; go forth and learn stuff. If you play a lot of shooters, go take a gun safety class and rent a gun, take it for a spin, see if you like it. If you like this blog, go research game companies and the history of the industry and game theory. Explore the interests you don't know you have.

Oh, and before anyone brings up the "money" argument, most musical games are played in the arcade at a substantial "rental" price, to the tune of 15-20$ an hour; If you can afford to play the game, you can afford to save up and spend some time with the instrument. And don't forget about friends! How many people do you think have absolutely no friend with an instrument in the house? Surely, they could borrow it or just tool around on it at their friend's house.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Hopefully this sheds some light on why I think musical games I dislike are popular and why, unlike other games I dislike, I actually believe they shouldn't be popular in a more perfect world. To me, no matter the genre, it's mostly about "game" part.

On MMORPG "endgames"

The WoW endgame was the whole point, or so they said before the game released. The idea was, yes you take a long time to reach max level, but once you do that's when the huge majority of the game opens up to you. It sounded fishy at the time and from what I've heard here and there, it indeed is.

I mean, if someone reaches 60, they're addicted to the grind. That's a new game waiting for them, one they likely don't want to play, and no one else can; another example is serious PvP in Guild Wars. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Spore will potentially allow you to jump to any game you want (presumably after reaching it once), if the latest e3 demo is any indication.

I'm very familiar with the whole issue as my brother is a record-setter for grinding (reached 60 in WoW far faster than anyone in his huge guild could name), and meanwhile I'm only about 4/5 max level in City of Heroes after more than 2 years (the general concensus among grinders being that it takes =< 2 months). I've concluded that, if you give someone a game and they play it to grind, it has to logically end or peter out somewhere, and then they're done with it, and they move on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing even for subscription-based games, as most people will eventually get bored of any game, and it adds a degree of predictability to when that occurs, allowing you to better plan your expansion release or whatever. But what you shouldn't do is presume you can add a bunch of content and say, "hey there's an endgame guys!" There's no such thing as an endgame to a grinder; make a game where the endgame is only accessible to grinders, and no one will ever stick around for the endgame.

Since non-grinders are likely on-staff saying, "yeah that endgame sounds sweet!", it gets implemented, but the target audience just doesn't want it, even if you hand it to them on a silver platter. This doesn't mean that nobody appreciates the endgame of a given MMORPG - in fact, a lot do - but from a cost/benefit point of view, you have to be extremely wary of working too much on content there, rather than making repeating the grind from level 1 increasingly rewarding, or moving on to a new game project.

Time: the ultimate RTS resource

Do you know the greatest reason that most people lose at RTS? I don't mean on a professional scale, I mean among the proletariat ranks of newcomers. It's time. Either they do roughly the same thing, only more slowly, as their opponent, or they can't control their units quickly enough in the heat of battle, or they can't spend all of their income before they are defeated.

It comes as little surprise; when Civilization feels a little like Chess, people play real-time strategy for the action. Still, wouldn't it be interesting to see a RTS where micro-management speed has little value? It's been tried, of course, generally by taking control of the battlefield away and leaving the player with the clerical work of the production... hardly engaging for most people.

In the end, I think stances and formations are the key. In mainstream RTS, stances and formations have never failed, not once, to only increase the complexity of micro-management. What if you were to add that layer, then strip away the norms? Could it work?

Many things indeed.

Boy, do I have a lot to write about. My cousin got an Xbox 360, I've caught wind of a bunch of gaming news, and to boot I've been doing lots of thinkin'.

Well, to start, I should say that the supergroup didn't work out. No one else of the dozens that joined the group knew quite how to handle it, so they did the opposite of what I do: they stayed out of it. they just kept playing like the SG didn't exist. Like a language that only I speak, no one else was in on it, so no one did anything with it. This much confirms my hypothesis that if I made up a language in Endless Forest, no one would bother figuring it out. Artsy types that might like the program don't see a synthetic language as artistic most of the time, the hypocrites.

I've been playing some Civilization 4, since I just noticed the big patch. It got me thinking about tech trees that don't have bottlenecks and are very open-ended: how do you provide a very accessible interface for such a tree? Civ IV did it by limiting all techs into a simple data structure: a AND (b OR c OR d), or something such like that. Thus, no tech requires more than 2 other techs, and one tech is alone on one side of the AND, meaning it can be displayed differently in a reliable fashion. Diablo II on the other hand, just did away with telling players anything most of the time, hoping it sufficed to say that a "recieves bonuses from" b. That sort of a solution works for an RPG I guess, but for a strategy game I need more concrete numbers. I have more on strategy games, but I'll save those for later.

The 360 is a very nice machine, but as I said before, the business plan suffers, and it shows. Marketing a "core system" box was a big mistake on their part, I think. Yeah, they'll sell more units, but it hurts the brand by confusing the market as to what they're building their games for. That's for the PC world; consoles are supposed to be simple.

Something is amiss in the gamerzone/reporting systems. Gamerzone is an awkward system since I play with all 3 mindsets at one time or another (the excluded one being "family", which is a generic zone for non-swearing and kids). Do I change my gamerzone every time I turn the system on? They don't make it particularly easy (you have to manually go into your profile settings and hunt it down in a menu), so I doubt it. Maybe MicroSoft knows something I don't; if I ever understand why so many people can play just one or two games obsessively (as opposed to games in general like myself), I will probably know all there is to know about game design... and maybe that is reflected in the gamerzones which cordon off my many moods into different "zones".

As for reporting, our favorite thing for me and my cousin to do is to introduce an unexpected element in the game, i.e. a totally unexpected form of mic spam. Yes, this annoys people. Occasionally, some people love it, and we still have a great time exploring the concept, so it's not just about pissing people off and ruining their fun; it's about challenging what the players of a given game can do in the game-space to have fun, and as it happens, that usually pisses those people off. Anyway, we were playing call of Duty 2, and one game we managed to get everyone to fight only with pistols, which was cool, but in one night we got reported 7 times, which is probably a record for us (maybe CoD players are more uptight than HALO players). The reason I bother mentioning this at all is the content of the reports:

We are always polite and nice, if annoying, when we do these things we do. Sometimes to rile people up, when they swear at us, we will be overtly verbose about how rude they are. Very high-society you see. We don't insult people and we don't get mad. Yet somehow, of the 7 reports only 2 were for being disruptive. 1 was for trash-talking (ironic since we were in the trash-talker gamerzone), 1 was for swearing, and 3 were for being "agressive". How report-worthy aggressive play in a FPS differs from trash-talking and swearing, I'll leave to you the reader to figure out.

My point is, if people don't understand how to use the reporting system properly, but do know how to report people, what sort of community can we expect when all the open-minded - if eccentric - people have been banned, in favor of people who persistently and explicitly describe the fellatio that others perform routinely? (And no, those people won't be banned, because it was the majority - we were trash-talked and sworn at by more than 50% of the people with microphones.)

We owe it all to Mr. Gabriel's GIF Theory.

Social Engineering, Part 1

This is not a game per se so much as a 3d chat client which only has emotes. I think it's an interesting idea.

(The Endless Forest)

I think we do think of our work mostly as games and not so much as art, but in the sense that art film makers consider their work to be cinema first and foremost. We have a similar attitude: we make games, yes, but they are artistically more interesting than most commercial games.

Basically they're batshit-insane artsy fartsy types who don't know the first god-damn thing about games. It's mildly interesting as a show that people are continuing to stumble about the unlit corners of the medium, which is heartwarming. "The medium" being interactive 3d technology, not games. I've seen this thing described as an MMORPG, and one way or another the creators insist on calling it a game. Accidental misnomer though it may be, I'm tempted to feel insulted, that they would call this a game. This is to games what a song is to amplitude; it's all well and good, but please don't call it a game. Yeah, you can interact with it, just like you can pause a song, or play it backwards, or at half volume, or whatever, but games need objectives, at least implicitly. Even all the Maxis games have implicit objectives.

So anyway, naturally as soon as I got my bearings, I wanted to totally destroy the "game" mechanics (in this case that would be to socially engineer), so I figured, "well what if we had chat, wouldn't that be hilarious?" I'm thinking of a few methods, most easily decipherable being a morse-code-like system of stringing emotes together.

The problem is that the player base doesn't seem quite big enough to have a few bad apples to spoil everyone's fun, even fewer ones who will go on the forums and see a guide I post which might be deleted, or figure it out for themselves. In the end I think I can have more impact on City of Heroes, and here's how:

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I've made a hero called The Leader-Guy (just Leader-Guy to / commands) on Virtue. Once he hits 10, I start a supergroup with a name implying chaos and/or randomness, then I invite everyone I see, all the time. Everyone who joins will be immediately made into a random rank, aside from #1 - which will be mine alone, at least at first, so I can observe the supergroup.

True, I will miss the many folks who decide to /gignore me outright, banishing my account from ever playing or speaking with theirs, but after 2 years I figure I'm on enough people's shit-lists.

Every day or whenever, I'll totally change the permissions of what ranks are allowed to do what. People will be randomly promoted/demoted/kicked. I need to set up a full system that works on d2 and d6 (the in-game number generators), and I will follow it rigorously.

I have no idea what to expect from this, which is why it interests me. I'll let you know how it turned out, and what lessons I learned, if any.

HL2 was a very unique experience for me.

You may read this if you are so inclined, as to why someone didn't like HL2. My response is more or less something I've been meaning to put into words for a long time about that game, so I decided to post it here as well. It's too late at night for me to be doing copy-editing, so the raw response-form follows.

The word "cinematic" gets thrown around a lot, but for HL2 and its Episode 1 expansion, I think it is more appropriate than for any other game I've ever played. Though it lacks cutscenes and doesn't play out like an interactive movie, the general style of story-telling is so much like that of a film that I never became embodied as Gordon Freeman; that's just where the camera happened to be.

In a typical 3rd-person game - let's say a platformer - the character's attitudes and motivations for the story's development are more or less independent of what the player would choose. The expectation for a first-person shooter is usually different, because seeing out of the character's eyes makes it immmediately unlike what one usually experiences in a book or a theater, and instead what they experience as their own selves.

In HL2, however, I see it as more of a device to hide the plot from the player. To hide details of a plot just beyond the reach of the audience has time and again proven itself a powerful and engaging storytelling mechanic, and HL2's camera achieves it in a way that a film cannot without getting a little nauseating. By putting the camera on Gordon's nose and keeping him silent, there's no telling what he's thinking in any given situation. The end result is that - aside from his credentials as an MIT gradutate, what he's accomplished as a scientist, and what has happened to him in the course of the games - we don't have any clue about Gordan Freeman as a person.

I think Valve is brilliant to make a "genre king" out of a story whose main character is someone we still know basically nothing about. No one has ever mentioned that Gordon regularly drinks coffee, or is prone to changing his hairstyle, or has a bad relationship with his father, or any other such detail. Alyx has mentioned in HL2, "You don't talk much, do you?", but this is as obvious after an hour or so of gameplay as his goatee. The character defies development.

The critical difference is that other FPS games with silent player-characters, like DOOM 3, F.E.A.R., QUAKE 4, etc., give the player a premise and a generalized template upon which they may go out and blast things as appropriate to the genre. The story plays out much like it would in a hollywood blockbuster, and the player-character himself is more of an observer on the narrative. In HL2, because the surrounding cast makes so few assumptions, the player-character no longer necessarily shares the player's status as an observer, but we can't tell if he is or not. The typical gameplay is there, seperately, but the single greatest tenet in the FPS - so great as to make up the first two letters in the genre's initials - is used as a mechanic to turn the storytelling on its head.

The most critical details of the story are that which we least have the capacity to observe, while the supporting roles are more visible (and thus more important to plot development) than the protagonist. I wasn't told how to feel; I was told how the surrounding actors feel, and expected Gordan (not me, Gordan) should also feel. The lack of confirmation in Gordan's feelings is what really kept me spellbound. For all we know, Gordan is an asshole; he could be a racist who secretly hates Alyx and her father; we have no idea.

Other shooters are married to the idea that the player-character is a roleplay of the player himself. I'm inclined to believe that HL2 was intended in much the same way, but for me, Gordon remains as much a uniquely non-self character as Mario or Solid Snake.

Just who plays medics, anyway?

I can understand why people like warriors, but give me a priest any day. The more power is put into healing, buffs, debuffs, etc., the better. I suppose you could work out a game where everyone was a hybrid of support and solo combat, thus everyone would get about the same number of kills, but that's just not my bag.

If I want to go around killing stuff blindly, there's the shooters from id software, or console action games. It gets old fast and, while it has a certain amount of visceral entertainment, it lacks a certain strategic quality. Warcraft 3's Blademasters and the like lack a certain underhanded, dastardly element. If I have 7 allies and we're facing 8 opponents, I don't want to be the guy who evens it out - I want to be the guy who adds 50% power to those 7 so that we wipe the floor with them. Evasion and distraction are the hallmarks of the support player - self-heals, hiding, shielding, what have you - that's the sort of sneaky, cunning gameplay which - ironically - you just can't get out of an RPG rogue or a unit that makes itself invisible. Hiding and back-stabbing is easy when you can turn invisible and then backstab for +50% damage. Hiding when your own power is to protect and heal others is the kind of PvP that gets my brain working.

Other people are only dissuaded from this because they can't take on other people face-to-face, and aside from perhaps making them feel cowardly, that always, always hurts their score. Thankfully we're beyond the point in the history of games where kills are the only thing that got points, but if you go pure defense, there's usually little chance of topping the rankings, depending on the game. This I can understand, because defeating the enemy is the bottom line... but when so many people in closed games pray that a lagging opponent will disconnect - adding a free win and removing the point of playing the game at all - it suddenly becomes very clear that vanity points put a large skew in how people choose to play.

I say "vanity points" because the game records one person as the "best" player on the team, but without the support actions of some of the lower scores, the overall victory of the team might not have been possible. The bottom line is the total score of the team, regardless of who gets what portion of that score. In some games, the "score" can even be partially or totally independent of the winning objective!