The Next Step

Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and expressing her own emotions. She’s also capable of taking simple steps to meet those goals, provided she has access to a skill that will instantly produce the intended effect.

What’s going on in this exchange is that Maryam initially has the “make Roni happy” goal. Since she doesn’t know Roni’s emotional state, she uses a skill (Query Emotion) that will give her that information. Questions, when successful, have the effect of giving the listener the goal of providing the given information to the speaker. So when Roni dodges Maryam’s query with one of her own, Maryam now has the goal “express my emotion.” She does so, and is now happy because she achieved a goal. This also makes her old “make Roni happy” goal the new active goal, so she asks for the information again, and this time gets it: Roni is calm.

And that’s where things fall apart, because Maryam doesn’t actually have any skills that can make Roni happy. The bit where she says “Oh no, I’m incapable of making plans!” is just an error message triggered when the agent can’t generate any moves. (Roni ends the conversation by lying, but that’s not important right now.) This is a point in the development of this system that opens up a few questions, which I’ll be tangling with for the next week or so. Namely:

1. How should skill effects work?

2. Should I have a class system or not?

3. What’s the best way to handle AI plan-making?

Question #3 is going to take some trial and error more than anything else, so let’s put that aside for now. Questions #1 and #2 are a little more philosophical. I intended from the start to have classes in Mouthwash, but I’m starting to question that. There was a bit of talk on Twitter last night about Skyrim‘s abandonment of classes in favor of pure skill-based character development. It sounded like a good idea to me – god knows I’ve never played an Elder Scrolls game with anything other than a custom-classed character – and I started wondering why I was so stuck on classes in my system. I suppose I’d always thought of it as a way to organize skills and make the possibility space of character development less intimidating to a player, especially given that this is going to be kind of a weird system. But maybe that’s unnecessary, and I can get that organization with skill trees without putting up walls between classes?

The most urgent question is #1, as I’ll be working on it today. At this point, since I’m just testing things out, skills are always successful. But pretty soon I’ll need a way to make that success dependent on character ability and the situation. I’ve always figured that I’d use a quasi-D&D-ish system for skill effects. That is, there’s some chance of success for each action based on the stats of the speaker and the listener, plus any other buffs or debuffs in effect. But then I imagine a big conversation with more than two speakers, all with potentially conflicting goals and play styles, and I wonder if there’s not enough uncertainty in the dynamics of that system without dragging random rolls into it.

So, what do you think of classes vs. skill-based systems? Is there a good way to design a system that takes character stats into account without using dice rolls?  Let me know your thoughts!

 

 

 

A Mystery to Herself

Hey, so blog’s on hold this week after all due to personal matters. I’ll be back in a week or so. I’ll have a bit more to say about Mouthwash then, since I’ve actually made progress on the AI basics after a long stretch of brickwalling.  For now, I leave you with the observation that programming social behavior often produces weirdly poignant errors:

Readings: Dynamic Systems

Posting a day late due to some travel kerfuffles yesterday. For the record, and since I haven’t announced it before, here’s the planned schedule I have in my head: Readings on Tuesday, a Mouthwash update on Thursday (if there’s been progress), Short Reviews on Friday, and a feature every week but whenever. Next week will be another disruption in bloggery, since I’ll be at a conference, but I’ll be back and fairly stable after that. Anyhow, lots of good stuff this week!

My new favorite blog is Dan Cox’s Digital Ephemera, which had a great response to my post on moral incentives last week with All Games Are Comedies. Dan discusses how this all relates to why games struggle with tragedy (in the classical sense), a thread which is taken up by Ari and ~hellfire~ in comments here as well. It’s a meaty question.

The same blog also has an older post called Games Are Languages, from the epic Games Aren’t Clocks thread, in which Dan straight up starts analyzing games as finite state machines. This is so hardcore I can’t handle it. He ends on a point I disagree with, by arguing that the performance of a player through said state machine can be a work of art, but the state machine itself is not. Me, I have no problem appreciating the aesthetic qualities of a state machine, as well as a particular execution of it. I’d say that’s pretty much what I do here.

Justin Keverne has a very thoughtful post on a Framework for Systemic Storytelling (Part 2). I haven’t read Part 1, but this seems really solid to me. This kind of simulation-driven story space is something I keep arguing for, but I haven’t seen its requirements articulated quite so well before. Lots of interesting implications to chew over.

In The Constraint History of Digital Games, Chris Bateman writes about how hardware and social factors played into the development of game genres over time. As with the best of Bateman’s writing, it cuts past a bunch of silly holywars stuff to get to some practical reasons why games are the way they are.

Finally, the first part of Brendan Keogh’s article on a game jam in Brisbane is just a great, really entertaining read. I’ve always been curious about what it’s like to do one of these things, but they don’t seem suited to the “spend an hour sketching plans in comments, write ten lines, then thoughtfully puff on a cigar” style of games programming that I specialize in.

Short Reviews: Swimming Upstream

Being slow with the blog for a while means my backlog of experimental games has grown even more overwhelming. Today I’ll be covering some games from the June Experimental Gameplay Project, theme “MASHUP,” so you can see how far behind I am. There’s nothing for it but to keep pushing forward against all odds!

Squirrels with Machine Guns and Towers of the Prophet

Most of the June games took the theme in a pretty straightforward direction, mashing up two genres to see how the mechanics combined. For that reason, there weren’t any mind-blowers this month, but it was a great platform for simple gameplay experiments. One thing I found curious is that I really enjoyed both Squirrels and Towers, which use tower defense as one half of their equations, despite the fact that tower defense is perhaps my least favorite game genre. Luke O’Connor’s Squirrels combines it with a quirky platforming thing, while Towers by M.C. Spross combines it with an RPG.  It’s the latter that I could see really destroying my life, if it were polished up. This would seem to imply that my problem with tower defense games is just the inability to run around doing stuff that relates to the defense-building. I’ll never be a real strategist.

BookwormTris and Coglitz

Another theme this month is games that I found instantly addictive. Along with Towers of the Prophet, this includes BookwormTris, the Scrabble/Tetris mashup from Steve Gargolinski. The control scheme is quite awkward, but it sucked about half an hour of my life away. I’m told there are commercial games in this mold, but I’m furiously trying to forget that information for the sake of my health and productivity. I don’t think I’m familiar with the source games for Jonathan Giroux’s Coglitz, but it’s similarly difficult, awkward, and impossible to put down. Are mashups a good path to addictive gameplay? It makes sense. You get hooked on a game when it can be picked up easily but is hard to master. Combining two familiar gameplay styles could be a shortcut to that.

Life

The artists were remarkably well behaved this month, but it just wouldn’t be an Experimental Gameplay Project without at least one game that flips off the theme, jumps out the window, and comes up with something neat. Arnaud de Bock’s Life doesn’t seem like much in its component parts: you’re a spermy thing, you collect stuff, things fall apart for no reason around you, and there are a lot of collision bugs. Yet it all adds up to something that doesn’t feel much like anything else. It also has quite a striking visual style, as seen above.

Impasse

Games where your movement changes the environment are surprisingly hard. It’s inherently confusing when an action with well-known consequences is suddenly given consequences outside of its usual behavior. Impasse, a slick little puzzle game by Wanderlands, has a nicely stripped-down mechanic that uses that confusion to good effect. The levels are small and well-designed enough that you don’t lose your mind following the mechanics. They’re hard enough to follow on their own.

 

 

 

Readings: Lost in Transition

I’ve been neglecting the old blog for a while, due to a combination of work piling up and not being able to get back into my old routine. But I’m back, hello! Here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I was gone.

A Fate That We Deserve: Choice, Triumph, and All That Remains. This is the fourth of an excellent series by Alex R. on the subject of Dragon Age 2. The series starts with a detailed analysis of the dialogue system, including several nuances I’m only starting to notice now on my second playthrough. This last entry is on how the story constraints affect roleplaying. If you’ve got one of these tragic conditions where combat animations and reusable sets temporarily disengage your frontal cortex, this series is a damn good cure.

The Fantasy Cyborg: Reading Passing Narratives in Dragon Age. There’s more close Dragon Age analysis over at Alternate Ending, where Mattie Brice digs into the treatment of mages and “passing” in the games as a metaphor for mixed-race and transgendered narratives. Great stuff, and very helpful to my current playthrough, a mage who’s struggling to figure out where he falls along this continuum.

History Lesson: Takeshi no Chosenjo. Fraser Elliot on the most insane game ever made, courtesy of multimedia madman Takeshi Kitano. This thing sounds like something from Lucky Wander Boy. I think I’m in love.

A Disappearing History. An interesting piece by Justin Keverne on the struggle of game preservation given the current trend to integrate multiplayer elements with single-player games. Keverne raises a good point that, more and more, the experience of playing a game changes drastically over time. Adrian Forest responded with A Time and a Place for Multiplayer Gaming, which tries to place this question in the context of preservation of performances. Keverne objects in a lively comment thread.

Keverne’s argument is that he’s not interested in preserving performances, but in preserving the ability for a player ten or twenty years down the line to experience the game like a player does today. To which I’d say, that isn’t possible now. My experience of Planescape: Torment in 2011 is unavoidably shaped by the years I’ve spent playing more recent games, and those years alter how I approach the interface and the mechanics. This isn’t unique to games by any stretch. You have to learn how to watch silent films, and even when you do, you can never recreate the experience of watching a silent film when that’s the only kind of film you’ve ever seen, when there’s a live piano player and a rowdy audience around you, when the projection booth could catch fire at any moment but you’re taking the risk because you can’t beat two hours of entertainment for a dime, not in this day and age.

For this reason, I think Keverne’s ideal of a game being playable forever – even for ten years – is a little quixotic. Even the most hermetically sealed single-player game or the most enthusiastically maintained multiplayer server can’t change the fact that game experiences are going to change as the context changes, sometimes enormously. And many, many games will get lost as playable experiences as servers shut down, platforms die out, and emulator projects get abandoned. Going forward, preservation efforts should include attempts both to keep code playable and to record performances, as Forest argues. But maintaining the playability of an entire game as it was on release day isn’t the most realistic or necessary goal.

 

Moral Incentives and Story Structure

There are a lot of ways you can classify the structure of a story, and many of them have been applied to games in one way or another. One that caused some discussion recently is based on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes stories in terms of the fortune of the protagonist over time:

Inspired by this lecture, Paul Sztajer at Throw the Looking Glass wrote a post arguing that game narratives have a tendency to cut the Cinderella story in half by never inflicting ill fortune on the protagonist. By not letting bad things happen to the player, games limit the kinds of stories they can tell.

 So why is this? Part of the answer, perhaps, is that players like to feel powerful, and get angry when power is taken away from them. As Sztajer writes:

Both these problems are symptomatic of a larger issue: that designers don’t like to punish the player. Games are centred around the idea of rewarding the player for playing well, and there is therefore a feeling that if you make the player character worse, you’re punishing the player and they’ll stop playing.

It’s not really an answer I buy, however. Some of the most emotionally engaging moments I’ve ever experienced in games have been moments where power was taken away from me. Based on what I keep hearing about this Aeris character, I’m not the only one. That said, I think there’s something to this idea of people being concerned about punishment and rewards for playing well.

Weekly Update: Blocks World

After two weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone paper writing, I am delighted to return to writing that no one will pay me for with Players Are Planners, a new feature up at Robot Geek. This was inspired by a volley of blog posts that went down while I was away, starting with Michael Abbot’s Games Aren’t Clocks and followed by Dennis Scimeca’s Games ARE Clocks and Kate Cox’s Win, Lose, Or Fail. As is frequently the case, this post came together over beers in a loud bar with my boyfriend, and I must credit him for part of the argument here. Also, I apologize in advance if I haven’t quite shaken off the academic tone. Or should I say: under hypothetical circumstances in which a somewhat academic tone has been employed in relation to writing, the current work argues that apologies are a potentially appropriate solution [32].

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week, other than that kind of thing.

On process intensity and procedural narrative. Procedural narrative is hard. Robert Yang does a rundown of the workarounds people have come up with to make stories feel procedural without digging into the ugly stuff, with advantages and disadvantages of each approach. A valuable resource for anyone concerned with procedural stories.

Guessing Games. An interview at Kill Screen with the developer of a game in which you guess the race of a person in a photograph. This actually strikes me as a good idea for a political game (most political games do not strike me this way).

How Can We Understand Code as a “Critical Artifact”? Also via Kill Screen, an interview by Henry Jenkins with an academic at USC who is studying the aesthetics of code. This is something I heard about a while ago at the day job, so it’s interesting to check in on it again. Ultimately I think it would be hard to develop an aesthetics of games without including something about aesthetic qualities of code.

5 Film-School Violations in Videogame Cut-Scenes. Makin’ fun of cutscenes, by Jason Schreier. This kind of thing is entertaining, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to start applying rules of thumb from filmmaking to scenes in a game. I think cutscenes are an awkward hack as it is, but if they are to be used, I doubt it makes sense to measure them by the same criteria as movie scenes. Movies and games have different needs. Information doesn’t need to be fast in a game; it needs to be useful. And movie-style pacing is a ridiculous metric to apply when players go through a game at their own pace.