On Gamification

So I'm looking at the trusty calendar of blog posts around here, and it seems it's been about five months since I personally have written anything. To be fair, I've had something to write about for a couple months now, not including the Axis and Allies Global contests where the Axis actually won. You'd think that would be something that should have come up, especially since I was the one who pulled it (actually it was twice) off, but I'm lazy. And as it turns out, the topic I am going to write about isn't the one that's getting written about. Suckers!

...no, you shut up.

All of life is Interface Design

I'm going to repeat that, it's important.

All of life is Interface Design.

Ok, what's interface design? In broad terms, when you try to get someone to understand how to do something, you're doing interface design. Everytime you're managing the way that someone interacts with a system, that's interface design. It's a pretty broad category, which allows me to make sweeping statements like the two up above.

How do you tell good interface design from bad? How easy is your interface to use? Ideally you want people to not even notice the interface is there. In this sense, a banana has better design than a pineapple.

Let's bring this down into the specifics. Supposing you've got a new game to play. If you've never played it before, and if you've got nobody there to teach you, what do you do? You read the rules. It's always an odious task, and oftentimes they don't seem to go out of their way to make it easier.

About two weeks ago I was helping some people learn to play the game Killer Bunnies It's a decent game, so far as I can tell. You have a certain amount of resources, you're trying to deprive your opponents of their resources, and it's complicated by the fact that you need to plan out your actions two turns in advance. I really can't give you any idea of the nuances of the game, I didn't pick up on them because I spent the entire game trying to figure out how to play cards. That's not where you want your player to be.

The game comes with a "your first game" booklet. Ok, that's good. I've been considering writing that sort of thing up for our games. It goes through some basic setup, and tells us that there are five kinds of cards; Run, Special, Very Special, Kaballa Dollas, and Play Immediately. Then it instructs you to deal with the latter two types of cards. Then it helpfully goes into how to play a bunny, which is an important type of resource in the game. It gets you through the first turn, the first round and then... nothing.

Hey wait a minute, how do I play "special" and "very special" cards? How do I play weapons? I've got a lot of weapons in my hand, and I've got no idea how to get them into the playing field. I get how you play bunnies, but most of my cards aren't bunnies, and I don't know what to do with them. From that point the game, whcih was ostensibly started, lurched from confusion to confusion until I had read enough of the second rules booklet (with helpful things like instructions for playing special cards), that finally I had an idea of what I was doing. By then the game was pretty much over. Briefly, this is the paragraph they should have put into the rules:

"Most of the time you'll play cards by sending them through the run. The run, in case you've forgotten, is that set of two cards in front of you. Cards that are the type "Run" (which include bunnies, weapons and some other stuff) can only be played by sending them through the run. You set them down in the "replace" part of the turn (Remember the basic order; flip, slide, draw, replace.), and then wait to slide and eventually flip them on subsequent turns. Special cards can also be played through the run with two important exceptions. First, instead of flipping over the top card of the run you can play a special card from your hand. Or, if you already sent it through the run and flipped it, but do not wish to use it right away, you can set it aside and "store" it for now. On your future turns you can play that card without having to forgo your flip. Very special cards are much the same as special cards, but you can play them on anyone's turn, and you don't have to forgo any flips to do it."

Or something of that nature. If that was for one of my games I'd spend quite a bit more time wrangling over exact phrasing and such, but you get the general idea. If they had that explanation in the rules the game would have been quite a bit less frustrating.

Still, that rulebook wasn't the worst I've seen. You want truly horrendous? Power Grid. Given a group of several intelligent, experienced gamers, we had to read through that rulebook at least three times before we knew what was going on, and even so we spent the majority of the first two games putting things on hold to make sure we're doing things right. It's a very fun game, with all sorts of interesting strategy decisions, but getting there was pretty agonizing.

Does any game do it very well? I don't know. I'm inclined to give some credit to Magic the Gathering, because I know they spent some time and money researching the best way to teach people how to play the game. (Fun fact: the card Giant Octopus got reprinted in 7th, 8th and 9th edition because it made for a really great picture in the "how to play" comic books. Apparently the octopus trying to eat your opponent makes it easy to remember you're attacking them, not their creatures.) Even so, I learned Magic the only really good way to learn a game I've yet found.

I got someone who knows how to play the game to show me.

Further updates on RISK updates

Ok, ok, one month is better than three, right?

When last I showed my face around this blog we were talking about RISK Legacy. The promise of the game is that each time you play the game changes irrevocably in new and exciting ways. It's interesting territory, stuff that I haven't really seen games doing before. So I'd been waiting to play the game for a couple months before we finally got a chance to.

Dramatis Personae:
Havoc Jack, playing myself
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon

The game comes with five factions, so maybe if we had been able to rustle up a fifth conspirator that'd've been better, but you go to war with the generals you have. Or something. We divided factions between ourselves.

Each faction starts with a special power. Which you have to choose from two. Then you physically peel the sticker off of the card it comes on and place it onto the faction's card. So, for example, Die Mechaniker (which, for those of you who don't "spreckinze Deutsch" is German for "The Mechaniker"), they get to treat the space with their headquarters as fortified. That is, they get a bonus on their dice rolls when defending home. Oh yeah, you get a headquarters when you start the game, to place on a space of your choice. I went with Russia, recently upgraded from being Ukraine on previous boards. The board itself starts the same as standard RISK. It doesn't stay that way for long.

In the game we each also got scar cards, at first they're just two types; a space gets declared "fortified" by putting a bunker scar on it; that gives all defenders +1 on their higher die roll. Or you can have a space with an Ammo Shortage on it, which gives it a -1 to it's defense instead. In the first game, due to a border war I was having with Barbarossa Brazil got the fortification and North Africa the Ammo Shortage. Each player gets one scar per game to place on the board (provided there are enough scar cards left) and each territory can have only one scar. They remain on the board permanently, affecting future games.

To cut to the chase, Napoleon took this one down. He owned Australia. He got to sign the board (They provide 15 lines for signiatures), and he founded a major city (Erik's Land) in Greenland, because he he heh, those suckers are gonna be soo cold. I founded the city of Scandiland in Scandinavia, Barbarossa founded Jaynestown down in Argentina, and I can't quite recall which town Zerg_Rush founded. Possibly the Prussian Consulate in Siam, but maybe that happened in a later game. There are other options for changing the board at the end, (in a later game, which Zerg_Rush won, he renamed North America to "Twelvepakistan". Or you can choose to upgrade a territory card; upgraded cards count as multiple when trading in cards for armies.)

Anyways, with the first game over there are some changes. Cities on a territory mean that the territory is worth 2 or 3 for purposes of counting for armies at the start of your turn. So if I held Scandiland it'd be worth two and Erik's land worth three. And Napoleon gets a missile instead of a red star. The stars act as victory points; if you control four you win the game. You start with one if you haven't signed the board yet (that is, if you haven't won a previous game), and controlling someone else's headquarters counts as one, and you can get them in other ways. By giving Napoleon the missile (which can be used once a game to change one die roll into a six) you make it harder for him to win in the next game.

So we played the next game. Barbarossa took this one down, (holding S. America), and put up a major city in Russia, named Syktyvkr. (This is a running joke from our playing of Russian Rails, basically that any word with eight consonants in a row doesn't deserve to be pronounced correctly. I'm looking at you Kyrgyzstan. So we tend to pronounce it something like "Skeer-ki-veer-ki-verk-i-gard." Or something longer.) And the game evolved more.

In the box they have some cards blocked off in containers with tantalizing instructions. "Don't open until all the minor cities have been placed." "Don't open until a faction has been eliminated." "Don't open until the world capital has been founded." (How do you open the world capital? It must be in one of those containers.) And my personal favorite. "Don't open. Ever."

After the fourth game we were able to open three of them. In the fifth game we had one faction with another special power (having gained one from being eliminated) and a couple new scar types. Due to repeated provocations by Napoleon, who somehow tends to end up down there, Barbarossa scarred West Australia with a toxic waste dump that removes one army from that space every time he takes a turn. Essentially it means that holding the continent is only worth one extra army, a change I think we can all get behind.

So after five games what does the world look like? It's surprisingly more populous; there are cities all over Southeast Asia, various scars all up and down South America, a continent renamed, and five signatures on the board.
Napoleon
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon
Zerg_Rush

Yeah, I'm still irked by that.

So what about the game from a design perspective?

Interesting.

So, I really like the idea of future games proceeding from the way the first one changes. Or, more generally, games that take more into account than the movement of pawns on the board. Richard Garfield's quest to make a game larger than the box it comes in is what gave birth to Magic.

Speaking of Magic, you've got to be careful treading in these grounds. You know how they did a parody set called Unglued? Well, you know what the two least popular cards from that set were? Blacker Lotus and Chaos Confetti. You know what those two cards have in common? Yeah, they both refer to Alpha cards*, but really what I'm saying is they both require you to tear them up to play it. People don't like getting rid of perfectly good stuff. I know I was unhappy to toss away the cards with one sticker still on them, one special ability never to be played. We even went so far as to look up the price of multiple copies of this game in case we wanted to play through it again. Beyond my price range.

Another concern with the game is, once we're past 15 plays, will we be able to continue to play the game? Probably, but if it's still changing at that point it'll only change for the worse. One of the options you have if you win the game is you can tear up a territory card. Literally tear it up. No word as to whether you need to sprinkle it over your opponent's permanents... anyway. You can make them better if you lose a game, so taking that option if you win (instead of renaming a continent, founding a major city, or raising or lowering the army bonus of a given continent) helps you control an out of control territory card. But if you play the game an infinite number of times (in this case, infinity is probably close to 40) you'll run out of territory cards.

Using stickers to modify your cards is probably the best way to handle that, but it does make them harder to shuffle.

How do we manage a play group? Taking the life of the game as fifteen games, it looks like we're going to keep on with the same four players throughout. Most games we invite people over to play, let them play, let them see how things are going, etc. In this one? I sort of want to keep the same group together, because it feels like the 15 games are really all part of one larger one.

Anything else? I think the changes could be a bit more radical. That is, I don't think they're doing enough to change the game. Or maybe I've got enough lingering resentment for how RISK worked beforehand that I could use more change. Still, it'd be nice to see "Nuclear Wasteland: Remove Great Britain from the board." You could print a "cover this up with a sticker" sticker large enough while still fitting it on those cards.

Even so, I'm still pretty happy with the game. Odds are I'll steal some of it's ideas in the future.

If we go 15 games without opening it, I'm cracking the "don't open. ever" pack.

*Hanging Asterisk. I don't see a good place around the web to link to for the chaos confetti legend, so this is a reminder for me to write it up someday.

RISK and its updates

Let's talk about RISK. You've played RISK, right? Everybody has. You take your armies and you conquer the world, only someone backstabs you and it all ends in tears. I've even talked about it once or twice on the blog here.* I've played a lot of RISK, probably running the gamut of potential game states. I've played innumerable games, including the time I brought it winter camping with the boy scouts. I've made alliances and nonagression pacts, been backstabbed, broken up other people's alliances, had bitter arguments over the rules and the terms of agreements. I kicked the board over once when I got eliminated on the first turn. I've played once on a double world with two boards, and I even organized my own RISK tournament. (Napoleon won. Oh, don't bother sending in for their tournament information; it's useless. The only thing I learned from it was that the proper spelling of RISK is in all caps.)

Given my longstanding connection to the game, it might come as a surprise when I tell you that the game sucks. Ok, not that much of a surprise, it's not like i didn't foreshadow it by telling you I'd be surprising you. But back to the point. Judging by the standards of today and the other war games you can find on the market, it's a wonder that anyone plays the game at all. Quick rundown of the problems with it:

-Australia. Friggen Australia. You get someone set up there and it becomes prohibitively expensive to go in and root them out. Meanwhile they're getting extra armies every turn.
-The cards. In the long term, it doesn't matter what else you do, the cards is all that matters.
-Diplomacy. I gotta say, I learned a lot of things about negotiations from this game. Trouble is, a lot of those lessons came via harsh penalties; you table talk because if you don't you're screwed. You don't form alliances because if you do, they screw you. You don't break a promise because that's a great way to lose friends. In a permanent sense.
-Only one kind of unit. Makes the strategies pretty straightforward.

That'll do, for now. The point is, while RISK was innovative and exciting when it was introduced what, seventy years ago? Game technology has moved on since then. You've got dozens and dozens of more modern war and strategy games that are a lot more interesting to play. There's a reason why we never seem to stop talking about Axis and Allies here. So why do we still play RISK?

Because everybody plays RISK. Everybody's got at least a passing familiarity with the game. So if you're forced to socialize with those long lost cousins, and they're having trouble coming to grips with the fact that you don't go to the bars for a good time, instead you stay up all night pretending to be a wizard or some such, well, it's something that they'll play. And it does have some merits. I griped about only one kind of unit above; inasmuch as that bothers me as an advanced gamer, the simple rules structure that that entails makes it a lot easier to play with just about anybody. The fact that at least one of them has probably played RISK before is also huge; it's always harder to get your foot in the door with an unknown anything; it's why I've played so many Axis and Allies franchise games, it's why comic book movies are the thing this decade, and it's why when I go to the grocery store and want pickles, I pick up Vlasic ones. Not because I know anything about pickles, but because I've seen their adds before and the comforting warmth of already knowing the brand name is enough to steer me in their direction. I hate advertising so much.

That brand name recognition is huge in terms of marketing the game. RISK is never going to leave the Walmart shelves because of that. Supposing your nephew is turning eight. You don't know a thing the kid, so what do you get him? Maybe you want to get him a game. If you know absolutely nothing about board games you wander into the toy aisle and look at the familiar names, and get him one at random. You pick one you recognize, maybe you dimly remember playing twenty, thirty years ago. What did you pick up? Monopoly. Or Clue. Or RISK. Maybe Yahtzee. Scrabble is for a more mature audience. You know- when they're old enough to snigger endlessly about spelling out dirty words. But back to the point; these games generate huge amounts of revenue for the companies that publish them.

So we've got a cycle going on; kid plays RISK, kid grows up, kid buys RISK for his kids. And while the player base is large enough that you can get steady revenue from this cycle, well, wouldn't it be better if you could turn these kids into true gamers, people who will shell out again and again for your games? To that end, Parker brothers, or Hasbro, or whomever, anyways, they've been publishing variants on RISK to patch up some of the rules, and to hopefully convert their occasional customers into more steady sales.

The first one of these that I ever played was called RISK 2210. "OK, so, you're in the future, right? You fight with giant robot armies. And you get generals with special powers and stuff. Oh, and you can conquer the moon."

Conquering the moon is one of my longstanding goals.

Later I got to play RISK Godstorm. In this one you're in the ancient world, and you summon gods. Which interact much like the generals. Come to think of it, it's suspiciously similar to RISK 2210. Anyways, in this one when your armies die, they get sent to the underworld, where you get to fight it out. When they die there? Then they're really dead.

I gotta admit, being able to sink Atlantis is pretty cool.

While these games are all right, they haven't exactly revitalized my interest in the brand. Sure, I'll play them, but they aren't exactly as exciting as I'd like.

Now, now a new one comes along. RISK Legacy. This one promises that the game will change, irrevocably, depending on how it's played. Interesting. I wonder how they'll do that. Or at least I wondered. I'm five games in now, and some interesting things have gone down. But I've spent too much time yammering about RISK in general, so I'll talk about that. Next post. Which won't take three months, I swear.

*For the people who are bored enough to click and are still curious, I haven't gotten much further with my Markov Chains. I've done some fiddling with simulations rather than actual solutions, which has met with limited success. Unfortunately, I don't trust computer simulations almost at all.

Design blogging: The Zombie Game

All right! We're back in action in 2012! Okay, enough of that, tonight we're going to be live-blogging our design meeting on one of our games, currently titled "The Zombie Game". Whatever merits we may have as game designers, coming up with good titles is not one of them. The idea for this game came about after watching the movie "Zombieland", and a discussion about why military forces always seem to be unprepared for zombies.

The premise of the game is such: zombies have overrun China, and the other powers of the world are attempting to end the threat before it becomes uncontainable. Why China? Mainly the large population to be zombified and government censorship to prevent the news from getting out. The playable nations are the U.S., India, Russia, and the Arab League, a loose and probably unfeasible coalition of Muslim nations. We originally included the European Union but discarded it as they don't have much viable territory on our game map, plus their military response would be pretty anemic anyway. (Havoc Jack adds there's some doubt it will exist by the time the game is published.)

Gameplay is similar to the Axis and Allies model, with specialized rules for the expansion of zombies and event cards which do things like add random zombie outbreaks around the world.

With the basic explanations out of the way, let's talk about the changes that are being made after our few initial rounds of playtesting, with random excerpts whenever.

First things first: we got rid of the U.N., or at least the game version. As its purpose was more or less similar to the actual U.N. (i.e. condemn Israel and the U.S. and give diplomatic cover to random dictators) it was an unnecessary mechanic and the only reason we could find for keeping it in was to continue to make fun of them. Since we don't need the game to do that it went.

We also removed the oil purchase mechanic we borrowed from the game Powergrid, which mirrors a basic supply and demand function, raising the price as barrels are purchased from the market. While it is admittedly an awesome mechanic, it adds unnecessary complication to the game. With any luck we can get it back in the game later on.

...insert distraction by Youtube here.

Okay, back. Decided to test out various battle scenes. After about 50 test battles against five zombies, it was determined that three tanks are the minimum necessary to have a decent chance of winning a battle. Two infantry and two tanks both only managed to win one battle out of 10, three infantry managed two of 10, and the three tanks won nine of 10.

Last but not least we worked up some notes for national abilities, although these mostly haven't changed much. Still happy with the Arab League having martyrs, although it could be likely to get us in trouble with someone. Being able to take out zombies without fear of losing troops to make more zombies is quite useful, IMO.

The Joys of Meaningless Rewards

Today we talk about filling bars. The meaningless rewards that games give you to make you keep playing the game. I'm even going to go one step further than that. Your standard fantasy RPG, you get experience points until you level up, and when you level up you gain new abilities and get more powerful and all that. That's your traditional leveling structure. The thing about that is that it actually lets you play the game more efficiently. I'm going one step less useful. The Cheevos.

World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.

That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.

This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.

This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31

I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.

Replays and Replayability

(No, this isn't going to be a what-if featuring Jane Austen playing D&D. -ed) (Hey, that's not a bad idea! -B) (No! -ed) (C'mon! -B) (Dammit, I said no! -ed)

Warning: This post will contain links to game wikis. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest not following those links through.

So yeah, this issue's been bugging me for a while, and if I can't get a suitable discussion out of it, I can at least get some content in here. First of all, what makes a game re-playable? Using some of our standard examples, in Kingdom of Loathing, once you beat the final boss, you are given the option to ascend and start at level 1, keeping one or more skills from your previous run, and doing the new run in a variety of different ways. In Fallout: New Vegas, and the other Fallout games to varying extents, you can play through using different skills and/or make different choices, leading to other endings. Another option used in New Vegas is that of achievements, giving you some sort of boost to your fragile ego by giving you awards for things that you either might normally not do, or for doing a lot of the things you would usually do. If you have a couple spare hours, you might ask Zerg_Rush how he got the title "The Insane" for one of his WoW characters. I'm sure you've run across these tactics to squeeze more playtime from other games, I'm just using the examples I've run most recently. Some, of course, are more effective than others.

The more philosophical question is what actually causes one to replay a game? Havoc Jack just spent at least one post talking about how he's restarted Diablo II, but I can't normally seem to muster up that much desire to replay a lot of games, especially after I just finished it, whereas I've seen him finish a Starcraft I campaign and immediately start replaying the same campaign. Every once in a while, I will go back into the vaults and work up some game I haven't played in a while, but for the most part I don't replay games that much. Starcraft II was pretty awesome, but after playing it once I haven't really gone back to it at all, except for running a few missions trying to get achievements. I haven't actually finished Fallout: New Vegas yet, but I don't really plan on playing through again once all the DLC comes out and I actually do finish the game. I ran though Fallout 3 twice, although that was primarily because I got DLC for that and decided it would be simpler to play through again. On the other hand I play KoL all the time, and am constantly ascending. Perhaps it's just that easier accessibility to a wiki and easier character optimization makes me want to play it more, although according to Steam I have played New Vegas for 62 hours, so I guess that's a decent amount of time spent on it. And of course, I did end up reading a lot of the wiki, and sometimes I find that reduces my desire to actually play the game.

I'm not sure why this single-play tendency only applies to video games, though. I've played any number of board games any number of times, I've watched many movies as much as I could stand, and nearly all the books on my bookshelf have been read dozens of times.

Insofar as no one else can answer the question for me, perhaps if anyone actually reads this blog instead of it being a vanity project for us they can attempt to answer the question for themselves.

'sploitable mechanics

Continuing on my theme from last night, we're talking about exploitable mechanics. Tonight I'm going to cover the difference in power of exploits.

Here's your classic example. In Super Mario Bros. you could jump on koopas against a wall in such a way to generate as many extra lives as you please. (So long as it's less than 99, that is.) By Mario 3 they realized that that's a feature, not a bug, so they implemented more loops to allow you to get lives. Broadly, these fall into two categories.

Coin loops; if you run around the same terrain twice coins don't regenerate but bricks do. If there's a Pow block in the area you can jump on it, turn the blocks into coins, go down a tube and repeat.

Life cycles: In a couple levels (1-2, for example) you can jump on regenerating enemies, and so long as you don't touch the ground you can generate extra lives like in Mario 1.

So what's the difference? Magnitude. 100 coins buy you one extra life. Even though you're sweeping up twenty or thirty coins in a particular coin loop, it takes significantly more effort to gain the lives than if you're jumping on the goombas. (Assuming you've got the mad skillz to pull of the goomba jumps. It ain't easy to keep it up for any length of time.)

Broadly speaking, if I want to bolster my life total, which exploit do I use? A life cycle; it takes me a lot less time. In general an exploit is more or less worthwhile depending on how much effort it takes to use it versus how much reward you can get.

Let's go with a classic Kingdom of Loathing example; Boozerbear's Salty Dogs.

Boozerbear, or so the story goes, found a bug in the code that let him turn any item in the game into a Salty Dog. This is a low output exploit; while it's always good to have booze on hand, salty dogs aren't that special of a drink. The real bonanza came when Pimonkey suggested that you could turn store items into Salty Dogs

Buy any amount of chewing gum on a string, for 24 meat each.
Convert into Salty Dogs.
Autosell Salty Dogs for 65 meat each

Gives you 42 meat profit per unit. Meat being the currency in the game. Infinite money is a whole lot better to have. While some of their hordes of booze and meat were nuked by the game admin they were still left very wealthy. Boozerbear's stores of salty dogs haven't run out yet.

He used to put salty dogs up for sale at 66 meat each; for a while he tried selling them at 33 meat each, but a player named Qrrbrbbrl (you'll excuse me if I misspell that) pulled the same stunt on him; buying the salty dogs, autoselling them and buying more. He's still got about 500,000 for sale at 130 meat per.

I'll go one simpler. There's an item in the game called a meat vortex. If you use it on yourself you lose your item and some meat. So you quickly learn not to do that. But someone figured out that if you had no meat, instead of going into the negatives you would roll over to the high end of the scale; about four billion meat. The secret got out, and the economy went up in smoke. Delicious grill smoke. (There was also an item duplication bug running rampant at the time, and no recent server backups that could be rolled back to. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.)

On the flip side you can get exploits that are too unwieldy to use properly. Take Project X. Project X was a Magic deck, a tournament deck from the Ravnica/Time Spiral standard season. Let me walk you through the combo.

Start with Saffi Eriksdotter in play.
Play Crypt Champion, without paying the red mana.
Since you didn't use any red mana, crypt champion hits play with a "sacrifice this creature" trigger on the stack.
Sacrifice Saffi, targeting crypt champion. Saffi goes to the graveyard.
Crypt champion's trigger resolves, sending it to the graveyard.
Saffi's ability goes off, returning Crypt Champion to play.
Crypt Champion's second ability goes off, returning Saffi to play as well.
Since you didn't spend the red mana (0r any mana) this time either Crypt champion has another sacrifice trigger. Sacrifice Saffi to save it again...

It's a stable loop of two creatures entering and leaving play. There are ways you can convert this to other useful resources; if you also have an Essence Warden in play you can gain an arbitrary amount of life. (Thus the name "Project X", since it allows you to gain X life.)

Now, if you're playing the game with physical cards, you can demonstrate the loop to your opponent and say "Ok, run this loop a million billion times." The rules allow for it, even the finicky tournament rules. It's a different story in the digital game.

On MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) there's no way to specify that a loop is happening. So you have to run through each cycle individually. Furthermore, you have to go through each trigger and priority pass individually to make sure that you've got them all correctly. So while it's still technically possible to play the game online it involves oh so many clicks and it's really just not worth it.

This produced an interesting disparity; there's a certain class of tournament players who use MTGO tournaments to predict the metagame for real life tournaments. But with a strong disincentive to play Project X online the data is necessarily warped. Since Project X was never really a dominant deck it didn't make that much of a difference.

There's another factor that makes one infinite exploit better than another; versitility.

Take the potion exploit from Morrowind I mentioned earlier. It's not the only infinite money bug in the game. Shopkeeper prices depend on your reputation with the shopkeeper. At least in some cases, you can max out your reputation by bribing them, to the point where they buy things at a higher price from you than they ask when they sell that same thing to you. So you can keep buying and selling it and make your money that way. But the potion bug is more interesting, since in addition to arbitrarily large sources of wealth it allows you to raise your stats to stupid heights. (It also requires less starting capital than the bribery exploit.)

Again, Magic provides plenty of examples. In a highly competitive game that encourages innovation, in a game with a bazillion interlocking pieces it should come as no surprise that many different combos exist. Furthermore, they can be generally ranked in terms of power level.

Infinite mana is good, but won't win you the game unless you also happen to have some way to use that mana.
Infinite life can sometimes just win you the game, but your opponent might be able to deck you, or just go even more infinite with something else.
Infinite creatures is good, but they usually take a turn to kill your opponent.
Infinite card draw will usually win you the game right there, since if you have your entire deck in your hand you presumably planned out this scenario and have some combination of cards that you can use to kill your opponent.
Infinite direct damage usually does the trick.

And of course there are other infinities (Project X is essentially infinite creatures coming into play. You need more pieces to turn that into a useful sort of infinity.)

At this point we could go into another constraint; the resources required to get your exploit going. But by and large, this doesn't come up in most contexts. Magic is directly competitive, you only have so much time and so many cards with which to win the game before you lose it. In terms of an infinite gold bug on WoW, or item duplication or some such, you aren't so directly competing against people, so it doesn't much matter if it takes too many resources to start it off. You can gather the resources at your leisure. While I like talking about magic, I think I've spoken on this topic enough for now.

Exploitable Mechanics

Today we're talking about infinite combos. In a game, you can sometimes find ways to shift your resources around so that you end up with more than you started with. At which point you can keep doing it, and keep doing it, and generate massive amounts of resources. In real life these examples are less common because almost inevitably you encounter negative feedback along the way. Here, let me give you an example.

In the game Morrowind you can practice alchemy. Take ingredients A and B, mix them together, and make a potion. Pretty much the standard fare for modern fantasy games. The trouble comes with the way stores work. If you sell your frost salts to an armorsmith you'll never see them again. If you sell them to an alchemist who already has one in stock, his stock will permanently go up by one. So buy both salts back from him; then close and reopen his window; he'll have two more salts for you to buy. As many times as you like. Or keep selling them back to build up a real proper inventory. It's a real easy way to get otherwise hard to acquire reagents.

If you take two foodstuffs and mix them together, you get a potion of restore fatigue. Not terribly useful, except that it sells for significantly more than the ingredients cost. But if you use the store exploit I mentioned above, you can keep buying reagents, keep selling potions, and get essentially infinite money and stockpiles of powerful potions and rare reagents.

Understandably this does bad things for game balance. On the other hand, Morrowind is a strictly single player game, so that's less important.

I'm going to define some terms quick.

Bug: A bug is anytime when a game does something it wasn't designed to do. This just indicates that the game isn't working properly. For example, in Diablo II if you stood in the bottom corner of Atma's tavern and dropped an item, it would land outside the wall even if you were inside. Usually bugs occur in a computer game, but not always. They've printed Magic cards that play havoc with the rules before. (You used to be able to give judges headaches with Opalescence and Humility. They've since worked it out.)

Exploit: An exploit is anytime you can use a convocation of mechanics or a bug for personal gain. That Atma's tavern bug? I remember it because people could use it to scam people in trades (we each drop an item, then we run around to pick up the other persons. Go stand in the corner so you'll be sure I can't get to yours before you get to mine.) When it's just an oddity in the game, it's a bug. When you can do something with it, like scam other players or make infinite potions, it's an exploit.

Hack: A hack is essentially a way of cheating at the game. Wallhack in counterstrike or loaded dice in back alley craps. What differentiates a hack from an exploit is that in an exploit you're using the rules of the game as they're laid out, with a hack you're changing those rules. To continue the craps example, on your basic come/don't come bet you've got about a 1.4% advantage betting on don't come. If you strictly bet that way you'll do slightly better than otherwise. That's an exploit, not a hack.

There are a couple different phenomena I'd like to discuss concerning exploits, but for now, I'll just talk about the effect on gameplay. For the first consideration, is this a multiplayer game? Ruining the Morrowind economy is one thing; scamming people in Diablo II is another. Generally speaking, if you're screwing over other players it's not a nice thing to do. If you're just making infinite gold that's less troublesome. But that sort of bug tends to get patched relatively quickly.

For example, early on in WoW you could easily script a fishing bot that would sit around in Stormwind and fish. Leave it running, you get stacks and stacks of fish, which you can sell to vendors. That was how the early gold farmers got their stock. They fixed the problem relatively quickly by making the fish you catch almost worthless. Not an ideal solution, but I don't know how you could better solve it. Err; how better it could have been solved.

If you're playing a single player game, do you use the exploit? The question you have to answer is how does that affect your enjoyment of the game? Take the potion example from above. Sure, you feel clever when you discover the exploit, but being able to make completely overpowered potions (yeah, that's another part of it. If you have a higher intelligence you make better potions. You can make potions of intelligence. With infinite potions you can make insanely powerful potions as well) obviates a lot of the exploring old ruins and discovering treasures that makes the game interesting. On the other hand, in Evil Genius there's a short time at the start of the game where you can steal from the world but the world can't fight back. So if you stop completing the objectives at that point and just loot you can get effectively infinite gold (just leave the game running overnight). But since the acquisition of money mechanic in the game is essentially another timesink I don't mind bypassing it. (I've already complained about the timesinks here.)

To think of it another way, if I'm playing through the Starcraft campaign there's not much point if I use the invulnerability cheat. (Power Overwhelming in the original. Don't know about Starcraft II). On the other hand, if I've already tried this stupid battle three times and I'm losing again and I don't like playing the zerg anyway and I just want to see how this story continues already and... and... yeah, then I don't mind using it to get to the next mission already.

Complexity for the sake of Complexity

Recently, one of the comics I read came uncomfortably close to reality. A game, about battles in space, which makes itself extraordinarily complex, and therefore not that fun to play. Huh. Seeing as I'm attempting to design a space battle game that's incredibly complex, maybe I should spend some time thinking about this.

There's a thing I call "upkeep", which generally means any sort of mechanical action you have to perform to play the game. "Mechanical" in that it's rote work, not like basketball. Every turn in RISK you have to count every country you own, divide that by three to get the number of units you'll build that turn. In pretty much any card game, it's shuffling and dealing out the cards. Let me give you a more detailed example.

In the game Lords of the Realm II you run a medieval kingdom, both the economy and the armies which you then use to assault other people's counties. It's a fun game. But every turn when you start a new one you've got to go to each and every one of your territories and make sure all the local economies are optimized. If you've got three territories, no big deal. If you've got fifteen counties you're going to have to spend a couple minutes every turn making sure nobody's starving. Setting up a successful economy is one thing. Micromanaging it entirely too much sucks the fun out of the game.

So back to the comic at hand. The game they're setting up involves complicated vector movement in space. I intend to use complicated vector movement in the Terrible Secret of Space. Why? Because I think it'll make for more interesting battles, and because I've been striving for the hard science fiction aspect of this game. I've also been flirting with the idea of a non-hex grid.

But using the tape measure to measure distances, and calculating out vectors, that all qualifies as upkeep. Whenever you're designing a game, you want to minimize upkeep, so that you have less boring parts in between the fun parts. To a certain extent I'm willing to let it slide in this game because I'm intentionally shooting for a more complicated, strategic game and that sort of thing can stand a little more upkeep. Still, I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum. Hence my joy a couple days ago when I realized the physics could support never having to keep track of spaceship fuel levels.

So how do I square that with non hex based vector movement? An excellent question. For the first, I'm splitting combat and non-combat movement apart. Non-combat movement just means getting from one point in space to another, and once you've derived the initial equations it's pretty easy to get Excel to do all the relevant math. That is, "how long will it take me to get from A to B?"

Combat movement is different. You have to be able to maneuver. If I was keeping everything to a physical board, I'd probably just rip off the triplanetary rules wholesale. On the other hand, this game is going to be played over the internet anyway. I'm thinking it shouldn't be too hard to make a program that will track positions and velocities of ships, and from there allow you turn by turn combat without the hexes and without too much upkeep. It remains to be seen if I can get that sort of a program running, so in the meantime I plot other things out.

So lets bring all this back to my original question; is my game overly complicated? Possibly. Adding complication to games makes them more interesting; Axis and Allies having varied unit types versus the undifferentiated masses of infantry from risk makes the former a better game. But too much complication lowers the interest level any of your players will have in a game. Seeing as I'm intentionally looking towards a chess by mail level of though to be put in to each individual turn, it's arguable that I've already gleefully skipped over that event horizon.

The Joys of Looting

I like killing things and taking their stuff. This has been the basis of fantasy gaming at least ever since Arneson met Gygax. You find that 8x& room, you kill the ubiquitous orc and you take whatever it was that he left in the chest he was guarding. Imagine, for a moment, you're in a role playing game where you've finally broken into the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do you go for the Ark like you're being paid to? No, you crack every last crate in the warehouse looking for goodies. Or at least something to pawn.

One of the basic principles of good game design is that you want to reward your players for doing something fun. Killing orcs is fun. Killing orcs and then finding gold pieces is a reward for having fun. Exploring the depths of a Soviet ICBM silo is fun. Finding a sweet new rifle when you're doing it makes you want to do it even more.

The trouble comes when the game you're playing gives you perverse incentives; it penalizes you for looting too zealously. Often times the designers do this with an appeal towards realism. Let's look at an example.

How much does gold weigh? In many games there's no limit given for how many gold coins you can carry. To an extent that's reasonable; given current prices (about $1500 an ounce) you could lug around the price of a decent house all day (vague numbers provided by courtesy of I can't be asked to look up the conversion from troy ounces.) Assuming you're dealing with lesser sums, then the gold coin you're carrying will worry you less than that full plate armor. So quite a few games take the reasonable approximation that gold doesn't weigh anything.

Of course, this easily gets silly, granted people's natural desire to loot. By the end of a game of Fallout II I'd almost invariably have a hundred thousand caps stored up. (I like looting; perhaps more than most.) On the more extreme side, when I played The Realm Online people would routinely walk around with tens of millions in gold.

Now let's say you put a little extra realism into your game design. Let's say you want gold to weigh something. I spent several hours playing Return to Krondor, which was a game that had exactly this in mind. Care to guess why I'm discussing it now? Anyhow, a single coin weighs one twentieth of a pound in that game. Once you get up to a hundred, five hundred and a thousand they automatically exchange your coins for jewels whenever you visit a shop. A diamond worth 1000 coins weighs one tenth of a pound. Well enough so far, if you'll ignore my confusion when I first encountered the mechanic. (I don't remember looting this diamond. With my gold reserves I'm rich! Hey; where'd they go?")

The trouble arose when they sent me on a mission up the coast. I spent a while wandering around in the wild, gathering beaten up bits of armor and such to sell off, and grabbing a dozen coins from each bandit that I met. Unfortunately, there isn't a shop on the entirety of the coast. So not only was I desperately lugging around all kinds of loot that I didn't strictly need, I had amassed about a thousand gold pieces. That's fifty pounds of weight, necessarily restricting my abilities to loot other things. What's worse, combat speed is based partly off of how much weight you're carrying, so by picking up all those gold coins I'm making myself less and less able to fend off those bandits that I want to loot so very very much.

And that's the crux of the issue; by giving me several options, all of which frustrate me (kill efficiently but abandon any loot; loot as much as I can but waddle through combat), the game makes itself annoying to play. That's not something you want to do as a designer.

Min maxing and fractal mechanics

Some people are crazy.

Ok, lots of people are crazy. All of us, in fact. But this is a particular kind of crazy I want to talk about. The min-maxers. The munchkins, the optimizers and power gamers who will spend hours poring over sourcebooks trying to find half a percentage more dodge rating. The kind of person who will spend literally forty minutes taking a turn just so they're sure they've eked out every last scrape of advantage. Randy. Err... someone who's name I've certainly changed to not reflect on the guilty parties. Let me start over.

Last night I spent a couple hours playing Torchlight for the first time. Yeah, I know it's been out for a while, but I just don't play new video games nearly as much anymore. Torchlight is mostly a repackaging of Diablo II. Close enough that, after spending years playing D2 in high school, I was preemptively sick of torchlight. Even so, I was reluctant to put the game down when it came well past time to go to bed. So naturally I fell asleep reflecting on what made Diablo II a good game to begin with. In my mind, one of the most significant factors is the character creation process, together with the vast range of potential equipment. (Even if you do go for the Burrito Dough Cannon every time.) Which brings me to my topic:

What if I design a game that offers min-maxers unparalleled opportunities to manipulate the rules to maximize their character?

Now check your mouth. For most of you, the bile is rising in the back of your throat. That's good news. It means you're (relatively) normal, and that you should hit your "back" button and flee for your life. This way madness lies. If, on the other hand, you're unconsciously salivating, well, this is the place for you.

So what would be the characteristics of such a game? Well, it'd necessarily be single player. Waiting for five other players to take long, complicated actions and then explain them to everyone else sounds perfectly miserable to me. Maybe two player, if you can convince them to do their setup elsewhere, on their own time.

The main thing is, the rules have to be incredibly complicated. Or at least they have to have incredibly complicated implications. Just having the rules pointlessly complicated is frustrating and boring. So Fizzbin wouldn't qualify. No, we want rules that allow for any amount of complexity you're willing to endure, and most importantly we need a buzzword to describe it:

Fractal mechanics

Fractals are... you know what? Let the power of song explain it, if you don't already know. Here; build your own. Draw a triangle. Then make it into a triforce by drawing an upside down triangle in the middle. Continue by drawing upside down triangles in the rightside up triangles until you can't draw anymore; they're too small. You've made a Sierpinski sieve. The point is, it only requires a simple procedure to make, and yet you can make it as complicated as you want. Neat, huh?

So how would you make fractal mechanics? Well, let's define fractal mechanics to have three basic properties:

The main principle of the rules is easy to grasp; like the way you draw the sieve.
The majority of the benefit gained from the mechanic has to be in the first one or two iterations
The more effort you're willing to put into maximizing the mechanic, the more benefit you'll get out of it.

Let's talk about this in the context of a fantasy RPG. In most of these games (I can't think of a counterexample, but one might exist) the relationship between your character's strength and the damage he does swinging his sword is linear. That is, you add +10 strength you get +20 attack power (WoW), or going from ST 10 to ST 12 increases your basic thrust by the same amount that going from ST 12 to ST 14 would (GURPS). Let's say we change that.

If your sword damage went up proportional to the Square Root of your strength, you get some interesting results. Larding on more strength will always increase your damage, regardless. But the more strength you add the less and less it benefits you. Now, if we also allow that the game has items that either increase or decrease your strength, you have the option of using those. The more strength you have, the less the penalty of decreasing it somewhat, particularly if the item has better bonuses to compensate for the normally large minus.

That's three levels of complexity (+str is always good-> +str gets worse and worse -> items that reduce str aren't always as bad as they seem). The fourth level is much more difficult. Suppose you start with a low strength, and use items to push it in the negatives. What happens? Most games would just redefine that as zero strength to make the math easier, but suppose we don't. If you take the square root of a negative number, you get an imaginary amount of damage. What's that mean? Anything we want it to. Let's say it works like elemental damage in normal games; I can attack for 200 damage +50 fire damage. Instead I'm attacking for 100 real damage and 40 imaginary damage. As long as imaginary damage takes away real hit points, we're still in business.

That's a fourth level of complexity; modulating into imaginary damage for whatever benefits that provides you.

So there you go, a fractal mechanic. Four isn't infinity, but it's close. Is it possible to do better? I'm sure it is, I'm coming up with an example on the fly here. Let's broaden our horizons a bit, to see what that'd accomplish.

Imagine a game where every single one of your stats worked like that; a simple relationship that encompassed hidden depths of complexity. Imagine that every item and modifier you got changes one or more of your stats, or offers other benefits. Imagine doing all that arithmetic by hand. Yeah, I'm thinking this will necessarily have to be a computer game of one sort or another just so you don't have to work things out yourself.

It's an interesting idea. It's only marketable to a certain type of hardcore gamer, and games that require you to be hardcore don't generate fans easily, so I don't see making this as a for profit venture. Maybe as a project, after the Terrible Secret of Space winds up. Actually, I'd better get back to that.

Port of Call, part I

Today, we talk about Port of call, a game that my uncle from the weird branch of the family designed some decades past.

I have the surviving materials of the game, two pieces of plywood with the world map drawn on them, and a bag of hand crafted wooden ships and cargo tokens. Oh, and a couple dice. There is no surviving copy of the rules, which I'm told is perfectly fine. They never had a really complete copy of the rules anyway, and they figure the rules could use some work anyway.

The game board is a map of the world, showing various ports on the various continents. Lines connect the cities, with spaces demarkated. The Panama Canal clearly displays the price to go through it-- $3000, which I'm told is unrealistically low. Oh, and there's a pirate, which I divine from the fact that the "Pirate Route" is clearly labelled on the map, including direction arrows and the "Pirate turns around" space. For some reason, the priate doesn't just hang around Somalia.


Possibly because the game was made before Somali Pirates were an issue. We can date the game partially by the fact that one of the "continents" is actuallly the Soviet Union, with Leningrad and all it's -istani SSRs. Redesigning the board, my first impulse might be to break up the old CCCP and dename Leningrad back to St. Petersburg, to bring the game up to date. On the other hand, period isn't critical to this sort of game; having it set a couple decades past doesn't require any other changes to be made, and there's a certain nostalgia for the cold war tensions. Frankly, I think a nuclear Iran is more likely to drop the bomb on someone than the old Soviets were. Well, except for Stalin; I wouldn't put it past him. That guy wasn't right in the head, to put it mildly.

Where was I? Stalin, the bomb, Nuclear Iran, cold war, CCCP, Somali Pirates.... oh yeah! I was talking about the game. Let's get back to that.

The major theme of the game is international shipping. You need to take cargoes from one port to another. Ok, that's a pretty solid basis for a game, there are a number like that already, although mostly I've played train variants on that theme. So let's look into what you need to run a game of that sort. You need an origin point, you need a destination, you need to be able to move from one to the other, and you need some sort of compensation for same.

The first two are partially dealt with already. The way the game board is set up, there are six continents (well, China and southern asia are in the same group as Australia, and the Soviet Union counts as a continent unto itself), six continents numbered one through six. Each continent has six cities on it, also numbered one through six. The advantage here is that you can uniquely determine a location on the map just by rolling two dice; the red one is the continent and the yellow one is the city, or some such. (1,5) gets you New York, (5,2) gets you Odessa in Russia, and so forth.

So we have a method of randomly selecting destinations, now all we need is a reason to go to these destinations. In the game Rail Baron you just move from one city to the next; once you reach one destination that becomes your new starting point and you roll up another destination. It's a decent way to go about it, but it doesn't support the notion of carrying multiple loads. As was explained to me, one of the things you can do in the game is upgrade your ship to bigger ones that can carry more loads. So instead of just the one, you could carry several, going to different destinations. Also, we want players to be able to subcontract; that is, they can ask such and such to carry a load for them for a fee. There's no way that's viable if you're just moving from point to point like that, so we look onward.

As an aside, if we weren't looking for that deal aspect we might be able to hack it with just point to point movements like that. You can manage ship upgrading as carrying multiple of the same loads, for multiple of the payout. It would even make the game more interesting, when to upgrade your ship changes things from a simple race (can I hit my destinations more quickly than my opponents) into strategic competition, what with deciding when to upgrade your ship. But unless it's completely impossible we still want the subcontracting mechanic in there somehow, so let's leave this aside err... aside.

Back to the task at hand. We have ways of randomly determining cities. How do we determine what we're picking up and dropping off? Well, we could roll for both; say you just dropped of in Rio de Janerio and you need a new run. You roll for pickup (Vladivostok) and dropoff (Anchorage). A neat little run, if you weren't halfway accross the world to begin with. But maybe you can pay the guy who's docked in Shanghai to do it for you. And he'd want to upgrade his ship, because he's already got his load from Singapore that he's taking to Vancouver.

It's a very rosy picture, assuming it all works out that way. Maybe the guy in Shanghai is going the other way; in which case he says "deliver your own load" because it isn't worth his while to backtrack. Or maybe nobody's closer than India, in which case you might as well just do it on your own. Or maybe it isn't worth their while to upgrade, since it'll cost more than you're offering them and the chance to take a second load for profit comes only infrequently. Generally, it has to be convenient for your opposing player to take the offer, otherwise they'll just go about their business. Any one of those factors (not on their way, no room for the cargo, farther away from the run than you are) makes haggling fees not worth the effort, and the set of them might make it so the mechanic almost never comes up. Which would be a sad thing.

If we look at the pieces (metaphorically, I don't have them right in front of me and neither do you), the cargo comes in the colors of the various continents. That gives us some tools to work with. For example, if in the above scenario it was for a load of goods from ANY city in the Soviet union to Anchorage, then it's easier on our buddy in Shanghai. You could have rolled Archangel just as easy, and that's not on the way for anybody. Much easer to pick up from any city in Soviet Russia. (In Soviet Russia, city picks up you. How did Yakov Smirnov make any money again?)

Here's another question. What exactly are you doing while someone else does your run? If each person only gets one run, you might as well do it yourself because you've got nothing else to do but avoid the pirate. If we move it in the other direction, say you can roll infinite runs, then what stops you from rolling dozens and dozens of times until you get one you like? Subcontract out any that make sense, forget the rest. Now let's say you can get as many runs as you like, but you have to pay some fee to acquire new ones. Sure, you can get half a dozen, but increasing the options will cost you. There are pitfalls with this approach too, if you make it too cheap you run into the infinte runs problems. And you've still got the memory issues.

Let's say you've got three or four runs you can be going on, and each of your three or four opponents has their own three or four runs. How are you going to keep track of it? By memory? That's a recipe for disaster. Write it down? Writing things down takes time, time that you could be playing the game. It needlessly slows down the action, like when they saddle a perfectly good action movie with a superfluous romantic plot. Perhaps some sort of token to represent it? In Empire Builder they give you cards with potential runs on them, with the cargo, the destination and the payout written down there. Let's try something simpler.

Let's say we provide the game with a deck of 36 cards, one with each city name on it. They start out in a general pool off to the side (like the properties in Monopoly). Then, when you roll up a new run you get a destination card. Put a load on the card. Then, when you pick up the load, you can move the token from the card to your ship to indicate you've picked it up. You still have the card to remind you where it's going. Hmm... maybe you want to leave a second load on the card to remind you what color goes where. But anyways, it gives you a visual tracking method to remind you what your options are, and it lets you look over at someone else's runs to tell what they're doing at a glance. It also provides a convenient way of subcontracting; rather you can sell the run to another player, and represent the deal by physically handing them the card. Neat.

Although that brings up another issue. It's one thing to allow players to wheel and deal. It's another thing to encourage it enough that they actually do it. Bargaining in games is all kinds of fun, and I think a lot more games should be built that way, but just suggesting the possibility isn't enough. I'd like to design some more mechanics on that, but the post is pretty long, I've got other things to do today. And, I mean, I haven't even touched on the pirate, or the rewards for runs, or the money system, or ending the game. That's a lot of stuff for another day.

A Conversation about MMOs

Had a conversation on Windows Messenger today, on MMOs and an article about them. Editing it slightly and reposting, because it's still worth reading.

Dramatis Personae:
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls: This is me. The quote come from Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Heinlein.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia. This is my friend and co founder of Awesome Games. Not sure where his statement comes from.

New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
also, interesting essay: http://www.wordaroundthenet.com/2008/09/5th-generation-massive.html
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
They're forgetting the Realm Online
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
where does that fit in?
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Just before Ultima Online;
it was a graphic MMO first.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Naturally I'm now annoyed at the article, enough that I'll be arguing
ie, arguing against game balance is a very suspicious activity.
so arguing that they should make encounters that adjust to players is all fine and good, but in practice that's pretty hard to manage
any sliding scale like that is going to have places where it's easier and harder and more and less profitable. In an MMO, people are going to rapidly find the easier/more profitable nexus and just keep hitting that over and over
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure, but that'll happen no matter what you do
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Hold on a sec, it's peanut butter jelly time
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
that'll happen
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Right, so even in WoW as it stands and so forth there are dungeons that people hit and people skip. It's very easy to find a group for the Deadmines, but almost impossible to find one for Blackfathoms Deep
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
but as i understand it when you're off to the Deadmines you have a great time
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
What would happen with those dungeons is that you could easily find a three player group for X, but never a five or seven player group. the 25 man raids would only hit three dungeons anyways, since those are the ones with the best loot and everybody knows it.
Strath, Scholo, UBRS or LBRS, and even less of LBRS. Don't ask about Dire Maul, and heaven help you if you want to finish out BRD
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
So you're saying the 5/7 man dungeons are pretty much worthless?
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
No, that for that particular dungeon everybody will know which number is appropriate.
people will sign up for 3 man X, and 5 man Y but never 3 man Y or 5 man X
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
okay
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Never mind if people are right or wrong about what everybody knows, it's a cascade effect. Dire Maul had some really good drops, and there wasn't a better trinket for a Melee class than the one you get from the king in BRD, but people never ran them regardless.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure, i can see where that would happen.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
The other thing is, it's impossible to write an algorithm that will uniquely balance the dungeon for any given number of characters, levels. I mean, you could do it but it wouldn't work that well. You have to get designers in to fiddle with it, and test it, and so forth, for every iteration of every dungeon. That's a lot of work.
Oblivion had an algorithm that determined monster level and treasure types based on your character level. It had a lot of problems.
If you're an explorer type like me, you can go all over the game and dig through unique and interesting dungeons to find exactly the same crap in the chest, which isn't ever especially powerful for your level. And the only way to make the combat fun after a certain level is to manually adjust the game difficulty.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
There's a lot of thrill in figuring out how to do something solo that's way more difficult than you should have been able to do, and if you manage it you should be rewarded appropriately. But all that means that it isn't a function of computer power that's slowing down different dungeon power levels, it's game designer time, which is a lot more expensive.
Quests that adapt to the player are a decent idea, except 1) Every single version of every single quest still has to go through design, development, creative, the whole thing, which means that multiple versions requires multiple amounts of design time and money. and 2) only so many quests are interesting. Pity the poor healing class who gets to spend fifty levels treating foot disease rather than skulking in shadows or beating down bandits.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Granted. On the other hand, presumably there's a certain amount of people that would prefer to do that rather than skulk in the shadows for 50 levels. I can't say the same for beating down bandits because that's always a good time
or being a bandit, also good.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Right. And I mean, it is fun being a healer, and there are people who went from level 14 to 60 in old Wow just healing in dungeons. But every group needs a healer, and less than 1 in 5 level that way. the rest of your player base are going to get royally bored to get to end game content for a guild that's going to dissolve in drama three weeks later.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Oh yeah, and you do have to balance for PvE too. I mean, if it's markedly easier to level as a hunter you'll end up with a surplus of hunters in the end game. you'll have the groups of three hunters waiting for a tank and a healer until kingdom come.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Though depending on how overpowered they are it might not matter, not sure if you saw the Noob comic on the subject.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I probably did, don't remember it
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Basically one of the devs went to the boss and said they were getting complaints about hunters being OP because the devs played hunters, the boss said that's ridiculous and went back to playing his hunter, which was ridiculously powerful,
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Oh yeah, I remember that now.
But yeah, in the end most MMO tasks involve tanking, healing and killing stuff. I get that it's nice to have ways to differentiate between different classes that do those essentials, but there's only so much you can do. If a class can't do any of that then it's by and large useless. I'd argue that WoW does it all well enough already, that the classes are varied enough that you can tell the difference between them. A rogue is not a warrior is not a paladin is not a druid is not a priest. While there's certainly a lot of overlap between classes, and in the end they still do the same three essential tasks, the classes are differentiable by other characteristics. Rogues pick locks, stealth and pickpocket. Mages are the only ones who master Portal Magic, and nobody but druids shapeshift.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
And if she wants different characters, then limiting what sort of character can do what sort of profession isn't the way to go. "Oh, you're a warlock? Herbalism/Alchemy or Enchanting/Tailoring?"
It doesn't make much sense for a frail student of the arcane to be out there with a pickaxe mining copper, but it does help to individualize characters.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, true. It also leads back into what you already said, people are usually going to do what's best for them doesn't make much sense for a warlock to be mining, less use for it I'd think.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Well, mining and engineering is a decent choice for any character type. And so is MIning and Skinning, if you just want to sell your crap on the auction house. Doesn't make much for character definition that way. But to do what she wants, what you could do is make for difficult/complicated quests to allow you into certain branches of the profession. Makes a higher barrier to entry, and makes it more important for an individual to be in that particular branch.
Experience for everything has two pitfalls; either it's very easy to level up this way (rogue gets experience for stealthing past monsters. Set your rogue to auto run into a wall behind a particular guard, walk away and let your EXP tick up. Bingo progress quest!) or it's very pointless; exploration experience in WoW is nifty, but it's worth about one monster kill per area visited, which means that you don't
get any levels by wandering around. I'll grant you it's nice to have incentives to do stuff other than the scripted quests, but that and a thousand monster kills will get you a level.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
heh
Yeah, the exploration xp in Fallout III wasn't so bad though, it was enough to actively make me want to wander out of my way a time or two just to get a new location on the map.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Yeah, not saying it isn't a good thing, but most of the time you got that experience by killing things or turning in quests.
On to the economy section. ooh! fees and taxes. That'll be popular with the player base. I dunno, I mean it seems that money sinks aren't that hard to come by in the games. I mean in WoW they had repairs, Auction House fees, postage, gryphon fees, so on and so forth.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure. You can get around some of that if you really try though.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
First of all, you want a slowly inflating economy; people are happier when they're making money. That means of course that more money is going to be going into the system, but again in a free market there are things you can do about that.
Generally it just means that the price per unit of time farming changes, and stuff is about as expensive as it was previously.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, much as the continual adding of content happens.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Secondly, it's fine putting in money sinks, but you've got to convince your players that they're getting value out of it. Take the stuff in Uncle P's Antiques. You in no way get more meat out of the events than you spend to access them, but they provide unique content, which people are willing to pay to see. Just outright taxing them, or making different currencies that are worth different amounts is less fun, and currency exchanges also increase complexity without adding much gameplay value. Thirdly, I'm not convinced that gold farming is such a terrible thing. I mean yeah, it sucks when you have to farm the same thing they are, and you're a loser for having to pay real money for in game currency, but for the most part you can work around it. It distorts the amount of money in the economy, but there are always ways to make money off of the people who bought gold. Rugged Leather can be
farmed in almost every high level zone in Classic WoW, and it sells plenty well. Not worth as much as hanging out at Tyr's Hand, but plenty of gold per hour if you're just looking to buy that vanity money sink.
Honestly I think that KoL does it best with the Mr. As on sale for $10. If you want in game currency, you support the game itself to buy it, both by paying the devs and by supporting your local meat farmers.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
True. I might also buy that t-shirt: "Support your local gold farmer."
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Supply and demand, items selling better or worse to NPCs of an area based on availability would be a pretty cool mechanic. Not sure how easy it is to code.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Pretty sure the other half of that can't be too hard, the part about changing the quest requirements based on demand.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Well yeah, but that also leads to all sorts of screw. I mean, take her point further down about legless spiders. You spend half an hour getting spider legs and suddenly they ask for treant bark. Kill a score of treants and now they want lizard eggs. Suck Eggs long enough and now they want an amber ring from a local wizard. If the economy shifts enough you could never finish that quest.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
I would assume that the quest being given would stay the same
I'm using the Bounty Hunter Hunter as my example here
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I mean, if they did it easier, like a contract is a contract and whatever you sign up for you finish, but then they have different sign ups at different times, that's fine.
Yeah, I didn't read it that way.
I do like the point about being able to make almost anything. And being able to make custom items, so long as the custom items are comparable in power to dungeon loot
Too much power and why are you going into that dungeon? Too little power and why bother?
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, that's a tough call.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I did really like it in Diablo II where the monsters used essentially the same abilities as the player classes. These ghosts shoot chain lightning. The Fallen Shaman shoots firebolts. That sort of stuff.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
So when I played Runescape, you could pretty much master every skill available, if you were willing to put in the time or the money towards it. However IIRC generally the loot you could get from monsters was better than that which could be crafted, however last time I checked in they had some new loot that was a craftable drop.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
A craftable drop? As in you get it off of a monster but you can upgrade it by crafting?
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Well, no. One was a piece of ore that could be smithed, the other was a half of a shield that could be smithed. The other half shield was bought from a merchant in the place where you started the quest.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
OK. Still, a decent mechanic, without knowing the particulars.
Interesting idea about dynamically varying spawn density based on player population. The problem is your graphics engine. If a hundred players parade through snigland with their mounts and a dozen pieces of customized clothing each (customized clothing is also bad for this sort of stuff) then a bazillion lesser snigs spawn, players start raining down blizzards and firestorms on them because I don't care if I don't get much loot off of them, there's so many, bet I can crack 10,000 damage, and everybody's videocard crashes or the server overloads and goes down. They introduced a global LFG channel in WoW one patch. Somebody made a macro to display about a thousand messages on it a minute to everybody in the faction and it was enough to take the server down.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
I don't think you can really use that as a general example though
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
No, I'm just saying that the additional stress of a bazillion text messages being delivered was enough to bring the server down. WoW has very limited character design options and no armor dyes or anything just because they try to make the game accessible to older machines. You start changing that, you start running into problems
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure. But this is looking at what would be next in line for the new generation of games or to make it truly "role-playing" which I think was more the point of the essay.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
the idea of a dynamic environment is interesting, not at all sure that it's easy to code. Early on in WoW development they had an idea for an alliance incursion into the Barrens, that would get further and further as patches progressed. WHat really happened is that the alliance was scared off by Barrens chat.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
heh
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Or rather they realized it's be pretty bad to take away the major early level horde leveling area. Still, I think that the 5th generation, as he terms it (I just realized it's a he, and I've been referring to it as she all along. Embarrassing), will include a much more interactive game world. The example with trees is nice, the example with weather effects is possible, but I'd really like to see actual war zones that change hands. Say the plaguelands in classic WoW, where one faction or the other controls the zone and their members can only accept and turn in quests in the area until the other faction manages to stage a comeback. Or stuff like that
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
As I've been saying for a while, I'd really like to see MMOs that adapted the GM role for the world.

Maximizing Damage

Today we're going to learn how to maximize damage. I developed this theory first with respect to World of Warcraft, but the assumptions required are surprisingly general, and apply to all sorts of games. This will require math. College level math. If that's not your cup o' tea, then thank you, please come back another time. Or read over it and hope that you can pick through the details. I'm also going to be going through the simplest version of the calculation, with the simplest assumptions to show how it works. You can add more assumptions to make it more complicated and get better results if you'd like. Anyway, on to the problem!

Suppose you're playing a RPG. You have the option of selling your Sandals of Water Skiing and acquiring some War Boots of Goose Kicking. Is the deal worth it? Which item will allow your character to deal more damage, survive more hits or what have you? Well, I'm just going to assume you want to deal more damage, that you'll worry about defenses and peripherals (the sandals let you freaking water ski!) elsewhere. So how do we measure how much damage you do? Well, let's take a look at a fight. Or better yet, one attack with your weapon.

You swing your sword, what happens? Well, it hits, or it misses. He might dodge, block, parry, evade or what have you. And, if you're lucky, you might get a critical hit. Now, how much damage do you do with each of those outcomes? Well, if you hit, you'll do H damage, let's say. If you miss, you'll do M damage, and if you crit, you'll do C damage. Got that? This part's important: We can figure out how much damage you do on average by multiplying the probability of a particular swing type by the amount of damage it does:

1) Avg. Damage = Hh+Mm+Dd+Bb+Pp+Ee+Cc

Where the upper case letter is the amount of damage and the lower case letter is the probability of getting that outcome. It's also important to note that the probabilities are stochastic, that is, they add up to one. Or rather, that there's a 100% chance of getting one of those outcomes, and that there aren't any other possible outcomes. If we swing, one of those things will happen. Mathematically:

2) h+m+d+b+p+e+c=1

Ok? Now, I said I was going to keep this simple, so we're going to cut the options down to two possibilities, that you hit, and that you get a critical hit. Rewriting those equations (respectively) we get:

3) Avg. Damage = Hh+Cc

4) 1=h+c

Ok? See, this is the problem with physics. We get a problem, and then we have to assume away all sorts of stuff to make it solvable, and we end up with massless frictionless pulleys dropping weights in a vacuum, and it doesn't correspond with the real world at all. Or real video game in this case. But yeah, I fully intend to add this stuff back in at the end, so bear with the simple version for a bit. Anyways, we're gonna want to stick those two equations together. Solving equation 4 for h we get

5) Avg. Damage = H(1-c)+Cc

Which makes sense, as the probability of getting a hit is exactly the probability of not getting a crit, since those are the only two options we allow. The next question we have to ask is "What happens when we get a crit?" Here I'm going back to explaining in terms of World of Warcraft, since the mechanic in WoW is extraordinarily simple: A crit deals twice as much damage as a hit. Simply:

6) C = 2H

Substituting that back into equation 5, we get

7) Avg. Damage = H(1-c)+2Hc

Simplifying:

8) Avg. Damage = H(1+c)

And that's your average damage, in all it's glory. If you know your average hit damage, and your chance of getting a critical hit you can figure this out. Well, actually it's your average damage per swing. If we divide your average damage by your attack speed (how many swings you make in a second) we get your damage per second (DPS)

9) DPS = H(1+C)/attack speed = A(1+c)

Where I define "A" as your hit damage divided by your attack speed. Same basic equation, but now it also accounts for weapon speed. I'm going to assume your attack speed remains constant, but later I'll also discuss changes to your attack speed.

Here's the tricky part. We need to maximize this equation. I mean, I can see that increasing your basic damage (H) increases your DPS, and increasing your crit chance (c) increases your DPS, but which one increases it faster? Well, multivariable calculus gives us a function for maximizing functions of more than one varaible. We take the gradient:

10) grad DPS = <1+c, A>

Ok? That gives us a vector, which points in the direction that'll increase the function most. Or decrease; the canny reader will point out that it's possible that it'll show the direction the function will decrease the quickest, but in this case it's definitely increase. You can check it yourself. Basically, the vector points in the direction of increasing c and A, and we already stated that as they increase, so does your damage. Anyways, let's move along.

Now that I have the gradient vector, well, what am I supposed to do with it? That's an excellent question, I'm glad you asked. Well, the gradient points in the direction of the maximum increase in damage. So if you boost your crit chance and your damage in precisely the ratio that the gradient dictates, you'll be boosting your total damage the most with the same amount of stat points. If you're getting stats along a different vector, then we can compare the relative efficiency of the vectors by seeing how closely they align with the gradient.

Ok, so where are we getting these other vectors? We get them from items. Items? Yeah, at the start I mentioned that I was trying to compare items; this is where it comes in. If I've got some boots that give 42 attack power and 1% crit, and I've got some other boots that give 70 attack power, which one is better? Well, you can render them down into item vectors, as long as you're talking in the same units as in equation 9, that is A in damage per second and c in crit%. In this case we have to remember that

11) 1 dps = 14 attack power

So we can set up two item vectors like this:

12) Item 1 = <3 , .01>

13) Item 2 = <6 , 0 >

There's a mathematical quibble here; can we treat items as vectors? Yes, yes we can. So long as we stay away from some not-gonna-happen ranges of data we're fine. (negative attack power or crit chances, over 100% crit chance, sticking more than one item in the same slot, that sort of thing.)

But on to the real problem. How do we compare item vectors to the gradient vector? We take the dot product. I'm gonna switch in bold letters to represent the contribution from the items, so A is the dps the item gives you, and c is the item's bonus to crit chance.

14) Item (dot) grad dps = A(1+c) + cA

If you sum that up, you get a number. Take that number and compare it against the number you get from other items. The largest number wins; using that item most increases your dps. If you keep doing the calculation you can select your items to maximize your dps. Neat, huh?

Ok, now step back a bit. What else does this apply to? Buffs? If you're trying to decide between blessing of might and blessing of kings then you can work them like items, make vectors and add it up. Sure it's probably going to be kings but it'd be nice to be sure. Ok, so you can also measure buffs. What about talents? Some basic ones yeah; + attack power or + crit chance talents, although odds are you'll want to get both. More? Skills, we can evaluate the efficacy of skills. All those numbers compare "white" damage, that is the damage you do when you automatically attack in each fight. "Yellow" damage from skills can be calculated much the same way.

What about more complicated stuff? Talents that give you benefits from increased critical hits, that sort of thing. Yeah, it can be done. It's a lot more complicated, it's manageable though.

Now think for a minute about the original assumptions; that there are only a couple possible outcomes of a swing, hits, crits, misses and so forth; that we can calculate the amount of damage in a critical hit, and that we can vary either damage or critical hit chance. Those are very general conditions, they can be applied to a vast range of potential games. Or other calculations in this game; you can figure out damage mitigation for tanks or rage generation or such.

Ok, there's the calculation and the big picture. I'm going to go through it quickly with miss chance and changing your attack speed.

Now, in equation 1) up there I posted factors for other outcomes to the swing; dodges, blocks, parrys, etc. Here I'm going to combine them generally into a "miss" factor

15) Avg. Damage = hH + cC + mM

And again those are the only possible outcomes.

16) 1 = h + c + m

Combining those two:

17) Avg. Damage = (1-c-m)H+cC+mM

Ok? Again C=2H, but this time we also know that M=0, the definition of a miss being that it deals no damage. Substituting these in

18) avg. Damage = (1-c-m)H + 2cH+0 = (1+c-m)H

Ok? We're also going to deal with the time factor, which we can't hide with a change of variable. Giving "T" as your attack speed:

19) dps = (1+c-m)H/T

Ok/ Now we take the gradient again

20) grad dps= < (1+c-m)/T, H/T, -H/T, -(1+c-m)H/(T^2) >

Four dimensional vector now since we're dealing with four variables. It's a little harder to read, what with the negative numbers. The vector is in order of Since you're attempting to decrease your miss chance and attack speed, so an item that gave you +1% hit would read like -1% miss. Here, let me make an item vector for you, with 1% hit and 3% faster attack speed

21) <1, .01, -.01, -.03>

See? The negatives will multiply by negatives and you'll get a larger dot product that way. So yeah, here you take the dot product again.

22) H(1+c-m)/T + cH/T -mH/T - T(1+c-m)H/(T^2)