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Thank you, Mr Douglas E Smith

I just came across the news (also) that Douglas E Smith, the creator of Lode Runner passed away last week. Lode Runner was a pretty formative game for me  and not simply because I played it a lot. It contributed to my design thinking in a really profound way. I wrote about it indirectly for Edge Magazine's 20th Anniversary Issue just over a year ago when I was still doing a monthly column for them. It first appeared online on their website here.

I'm reposting the article here, today, to re-present those thoughts outside of the celebratory context they were originally published under.

 

Time Invested

Toward the end of 1982, sales of the Commodore VIC-20 were in decline and as Christmas approached outlets like K-Mart were marking down prices on the VIC-20 to clear out shelf space for its next-gen replacement, the Commodore-64.

As the only child of a single, working mom, I had long given up hope of ever receiving an Intellivision or a ColecoVision, so it must have been some magical combination of my relentless begging, K-Mart’s aggressive pricing, and Captain Kirk’s commercial for the ‘home computer of the Eighties’ that allowed my mother to entertain the fantasy that her son might one day work with computers on a starship.

Her fantasy came half true – and so did mine. The VIC-20 could play games on cartridge, just like a console, but the selection was terrible and the cartridges were $80; half the price she’d paid for the machine itself. I only ever received one.

Fortunately, the one I got was Lode Runner, which is an excellent game. Even better, it included a level editor that allowed me to design my own levels and save them to cassette. Once I had exhausted the levels that shipped with the game, I began making my own content. When I tired of that, I taught myself to code in BASIC and made my own games. My first complete game was a text adventure where you were a thief who needed to get to a safe and loot it before the person in the house caught you. 

Sadly, by ’84 or ’85 I had all but drained the VIC-20 of its fun. Making more text adventures to play by myself offered diminishing returns and after three years of Lode Runner, the game had become stale. My mother could not afford to buy me another computer and eventually I stopped using my VIC-20.

My last hurrah as a gamer was spending most of ’85 - ‘86 school year playing Ultima IV with a friend on his Apple II. We played nearly every day after school and finished the game perhaps three times, but after that, I don’t think I played another game for about seven years.

Twenty years ago, in 1993, I emerged from my own personal gaming Dark Age. The game everyone was playing was Doom, and while I still did not have a PC to play it on, I had several friends who did. A good many of my nights were spent hanging out at friends’ houses playing Doom while everyone else watched Aliens on VHS and got hammered. And it didn’t stop with Doom; Syndicate also came out that year, and the following year X-Com and TIE Fighter both landed. The year after that was Dark Forces and Command and Conquer. And as the decade wore on, things just got better. Duke Nukem 3D and Quake both launched in ’96, and 1997 was Jedi Knight. And then, sometime in late 1997 or early 1998, I played the demo of Thief on a friend’s PC. That was when I knew I had to have my own machine.

In 1998, both Thief and the original Rainbow 6 turned first-person shooters on their head by challenging the notion that ‘shooting’ was the important part of the genre. I played both on my own Pentium II, 300 MHz machine with 64M of RAM, running under Windows ’97. It was on this machine that I played Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Unreal and Unreal Tournament. By the time Deus Ex shipped in 2000, my pitiful P2 couldn’t keep up – and neither could my wallet. 

And then something magical happened. I started leveraging the skills I had learned years before on the VIC-20. Not the BASIC coding skills or the Lode Runner specific level design skills – but rather the tenacity and determination to squeeze more fun out of the machine. I started building levels for Unreal Tournament, and then levels for mods. I found copies of older games – games that built a bridge back across my Dark Ages toward my childhood. I played Dune 2, Command and Conquer, Ultima V. I played Wolfenstein 3d and made levels for that too.

I used the times when I was not able to consume games as entertainment to reflect upon how and why I value games in the ways that I do. Before sitting down to write this column and reflect upon the last twenty years of gaming, I had assumed that the seeds of my appreciation for player expression and creative play were planted by a few key titles in the mid ‘90s. But now I see that, for me at least, the verbs ‘to play’, ‘to create’ and ‘to learn’ all represent effectively the same concept and that fusing these concepts is something I hope my games might do for others. 

It seems to me, now, that these past twenty years of playing games, learning how they mean, and how to make them, and then creating them for others is an obvious – even predictable consequence of those three years I spent with my VIC-20. In some sense, the person I am today represents the delivery of some vague and indirect promise that Captain Kirk made to my mother. He suggested that a game machine is a delivery vehicle for content and that it ultimately supports the broadcast culture paradigm that separates creators from consumers. A computer, by contrast, can be used to create. And as a consequence, even in technological obsolescence its potential value approaches infinity. A game machine will always depreciate in value, while a computer is an investment in the future.

Convergence Culture

Part Three: If you build it, they will come.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first game industry job was as a level designer. The game level editor was at least as important to my personal creative development as was the word processor. I believe a good level editor can be as engaging and entertaining as a game itself and - when combined with a great game - has the potential to create a positive feedback loop between playing and creating. This is important if you believe - as I do - that playing and creating are fundamentally the same thing.

But designing and building level editors is hard. On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine, from a space station to an African savanna to the Eiffel Tower, or even all of these things at once. Conversely, you also want player created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself.

The first time I saw a screenshot of the isometric grid of flowerbeds and fences, cornfields and cattle that we call Farmville, I was stricken with clammy-skinned flashbacks of Floaters and Chrysalids. I needed to know where 'Sniper' Sato was, and who was packing the Blaster Launcher. But regardless of superficial similarities, Farmville is nothing like X-Com. Farmville is essentially a level building game, and X-Com is a game that needs an unending stream of new levels. What a match.

Farmville affords player expression through the design of farms, and a forum for sharing those expressions with others. The actual gameplay of Farmville is either shoddy, evil or non-existent depending on your worldview. X-Com, by contrast, is a hardcore, single-player strategy game in which players express themselves through the way they confront the game challenges. The forum they have for sharing that expression is non-existent (but at least it's not evil).

One of the amazing achievements of X-Com is that it uses a procedural 'level assembler' to construct appropriate levels on demand, offering an infinite variety of terrain in which players battle to repel the alien invasion of Earth. Underlying this 'assembler' are simple rules which determine what makes a valid level. Farmville farms, by contrast, are player generated. Because Farmville explicitly rewards time spent with experience and profit, many Farmville farms are rigorously optimized with dense fields of high-yield crops. But because Farmville is also a platform for socialization and expression, there is also an incredible variety of farms that reject progression entirely; from eclectic need-one-of-everything collections, to idyllic pastoral scenes where some kind of virtual Feng Shui reigns.

In order to give players the feeling of scope required by an X-Com game, a modern remake must confront a difficult challenge. Building an entire planet worth of content by hand is not feasible. Procedural generation risks feeling wooden, and lacking in creative flourish. Relying simply on user generation risks undercutting serious themes with an overwhelming percentage of penis-shaped levels. But a game that incentivizes players to make appropriate X-Com levels can potentially solve this problem.

A casual game for mobile devices or the web that puts players in the role of Mayor, Farmer, or Ranger, and gives them the tools to build all the urban, rural and wilderness landscapes needed, while explicitly rewarded their time spent with experience and profit would quickly generate the needed content. Adding another reward axis selecting for designer-defined 'appropriateness' would lead to player created maps suitable for playing X-Com in. Those maps could then be published to the cloud and pulled down by the game on demand. These casual players cum level designers would be rewarded with experience, gifts, rare items and prestige for designing X-Com appropriate environments. Friend management, sharing, and publish/subscribe tools would begin to bridge the sadly widening gulf between two important groups of players.

It's been almost twenty years since X-Com and an entire generation of similarly hardcore games excluded a mass-market gaming audience a hundred times the size of the audience they chose to service. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way. The casual revolution - as exemplified by Farmville - is excluding the hardcore gamer. It doesn't need to be this way. We do not have to accept the cynical segregation of diverse audiences when the technology exists today to unite us. By linking our games, we create new domains in which all kinds of players can create, co-operate, compete, collaborate, and ultimately converge.