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Convergence Culture

Part Eight: Future Past

Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to fall by the wayside in favour of more aggressive exploitation of insidiously monetized shovel ware. How could developers – constantly understaffed and struggling to make every deadline – ever find the time to build a Facebook or iPhone game that would meaningfully link casual players to their fifty million dollar Christmas release if they couldn't find the time to make their Beta?

The World of Warcraft Armoury has been around for quite a while, but let’s face it: Blizzard can afford to put a man on the moon if they want, so they’re not much of a model for the rest. Various Spore browser apps allow you to look at the Sporepedia on a mobile device, but these offer no gameplay, and aren’t even built by EA. The best that the year’s biggest releases could muster – like Modern Warfare 2 – were fan made game guides and various utilities for mobile devices that allowed you to find Intel Drops, know what Perks and Kill Streak Rewards were coming and read some map strategies. None of these things were meaningfully linking different groups of players to a single unified experience.

I wasn't my only non-believer, either. I received plenty of emails skeptical of the idea that some 40 year old executive might want to manage a crime family from his Android phone, and in doing, drive a component of the open world urban crime game his son was playing. More openly hostile emails condemned me for selling out to the marketing vampires I identified in the intro for suggesting we could do everything I was suggesting profitably, while others accused me of undermining the ultimate goal of building the perfect immersive simulation of everything.

But while my pipe-dreams and prognostications may remain heretical for some, they might also end up coming true. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – developed by my esteemed former co-workers – has done a fantastic job of opening the door for a huge audience of casual and social gamers to peer into the amazing world of Renaissance Italy and the life of Ezio. I had no idea AC: Legacy was being developed, but it achieves many of the things I suggested months ago (and in many ways better than I imagined – which is no surprise knowing who was involved). This is an important first step toward the future that I’m talking about because it challenges the notion that the kinds of fantasies gamers are interested in are inaccessible to a broad audience. We may have always suspected that the fantasy of Assassin’s Creed had a broad appeal beyond the existing audience of a few million hardcore gamers – but we couldn’t prove it. Now we can. Now we will be able to measure the appeal of that fantasy to a real audience.

Dust 514 – though still in development – openly attempts to link two of the most hardcore audiences of gamers out there: competitive online FPS players and dedicated PvP MMO players. While the potential scope of this intramedia link is smaller than that which would connect Assassin’s Creed on console to Facebook gamers, the data will be just as interesting and important. Will an audience of ‘me first’ shooter players accept the cascade of consequences that emerge from the proposed design? Will they – for example – willingly engage in a battle they can’t win to achieve the strategic goal of a group of players in EVE? Will EVE players be willing to leave their best laid invasion plans in the hands of a bunch of bickering fourteen year-olds with hyper-conductive nervous systems? Is the patience and ruthless plotting of the EVE community compatible with the twitchy thirst for chaos of an FPS community?

And perhaps the most important question raised by these games is whether or not the connection between different audiences will act as a gateway between the games. Will people who have never played a console game give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood a chance if they are invested in Legacy? Will ageing shooter fans invested in Dust 514 decide to give EVE a try as their reflexes fail them and they fall under the curve?

Before this article ever sees print we'll have answers to these and other questions, and developers will already be hard at work on a second wave of games that strive to do even more than I imagined. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Convergence Culture

Part Six: Platform Jumping

For the last five parts of this series I talked around the issue of Single Player games and their place in the intramedia landscape I have been describing. I've looked at how social world building games like Farmville might seed content into SP game worlds. I've looked at how mobile apps might provide the backbone for a game economy whose principle consumers would be players in SP worlds. I've looked at how organization management games like Mafia Wars could provide a framework of story content to sustain the ongoing life of a SP game. But I've not really talked explicitly about the Single Player game itself and what it might be like in this new intramedia model.

While I personally feel that modern AAA single player games are too long, the reality is that is not the case for your typically 18-24 year old who does not have an enormous game buying budget and needs a lot of content if he has any hope of keeping himself distracted from studying. I would love to make the argument that the next-generation of Single Player game should be a four hour experience, but I know that's not realistic. That said, with the increasing economic pressure for even SP games to be online (to protect against piracy), I am beginning to suspect the oft-recurring memes of the Episodic SP game, and the game-world-as-platform are finally going to arrive.

In the case of the more systemic open world games such as Fallout, Borderlands, GTA and others, we already see a trend toward serving players a lot of downloadable content. The reasons for this are obvious; the profit margins on DLC are relatively high for developers and publishers. This means that even if demand is low - say only 5% to 10% of players purchase DLC after they finish the original game - the development costs to shipping what is effectively script into an open world is a tiny fraction of what it costs to build that same content in parallel with the game (especially given that shipped games are stable).

I think the real question facing Single Player games going forward - particularly in the difficult economic climate of today - is how to reduce the cost of getting the game world into the hands of players, and increase the amount of high-profit-margin content we release post-launch into these stable, proven platforms. This only makes economic sense when you consider that currently only a tiny handful of game releases are profitable and all other game development is funded by a few hits.

Why is Fallout 3 a one hundred hour experience? Admittedly, even I made time to finish it, and I even downloaded some of the DLC. But it came at a tremendous cost in terms of lost opportunity to play other games. With the world of Fallout 3 sitting on my hard drive, and the ability of the developers to push more content into that world at any time, the real question is, could they have reduced their development costs by shipping me the game in five ten dollar chunks over the course of the two months that it took me to play it?

When we start to imagine a game like Fallout as being more like a platform for serving content, the integration of some of the other concepts I previously discussed starts to make more sense. The small settlements that dot the landscape can easily be imagined as being served to the platform from a 'manage your wasteland settlement' social game. The shops in those settlements can easily be imagined as shops run by players from their mobile devices. And without the game needing to become a full-blown persistent world MMO, is it trivial to imagine supporting drop-in co-op. Once we have a game world rendered perpetually 'fresh' because of the input of other players, it is also much easier to imagine that I would pay a reasonable price for the game-world-as-platform, even if it only shipped with four hours of developer content. Done correctly, I even suspect the world could be given away for free, with features such as player-generated settlements and player run shops being unlocked by micro transaction. High quality, well polished story content could then be sold at a premium - five to ten dollars for an episode running anywhere between 3-6 hours.

I think the appeal from a publisher and developer standpoint is obvious. This is a powerful way to maximize the efficiency of your staff and to generate higher-margin, lower-risk profit, more steadily. The argument I hear against trying it this way is that it is unproven and conservative executives don't seem to want to be the first to risk their company on unproven business models.

Perhaps all the executives need is for players to demand it loudly enough - and to support it when it does finally arrive.

Convergence Culture

Part Four: An offer that can't be refused

Thought Experiment One: imagine Pong, tweaked to be more exciting. Instead of showing the AI paddle on the other side of the screen, we hide from the player everything that happens over the center line. An elegant pacing algorithm tracks the players returns and the score of the game, and fakes everything that happens over the line in order to constantly escalate the intensity. Pong matches would be full of ever more spectacular volleys reaching increasingly extreme climaxes. Every game would be more incredible than the last - and yet, very obviously, something would be lost, and this game would suck.

Thought Experiment Two: imagine a Battlefield 2 match where both team Commanders colluded to make the match as dramatically exciting as possible for the unwitting players on the ground. The Commanders would share information to guide their respective squads into interestingly asymmetric skirmishes. They would track the score and collaborate to keep things close, ensuring things like supply drops, artillery strikes and air support always arrived at the most desperate hour. Suddenly every Battlefield 2 match would be as good as the best one you ever had (unless you discovered the collusion, in which case it would all suddenly seem very pointless).

The principle challenge in designing and building a dynamic narrative that responds to player action is not in the building of it (which is, itself, a wicked problem), but rather in the designing of it. It is, in fact, the same problem as designing Extreme Pong: that in handing over drama management to an invisible algorithm, the player has no way to know his actions are driving the story and the dynamic narrative becomes indistinguishable from an authored one - and likely not as good.

With Commander mode, Battlefield 2 hints at a way to cut the Gordian Knot: it suggests the possibility that we can outsource drama management to other players. On the one hand, playing the Commander gives strong feelings of agency and on the other, players on the ground know the difference between a high level experience that is pre-packed by a designer and one that is managed on-the-fly by a player with an agenda.

The main problem with Commander mode is that it needs to be synchronized with the main game at runtime, making it a pretty niche kind of fun. But I believe this is easily fixed by decoupling the 'game' of player controlled drama management from the low-level action game being managed. If the management game is designed to be fun as a management game instead of as a part of a low level combat game, then one player's management game becomes another player's drama manager. This is where intramedia convergence comes in.

Thought Experiment Three: imagine Mafia 2, the open world game, shipped with Mafia Wars, the mobile application as its player narrative driver. Instead of spamming all of Facebook with requests to join a mob, Mafia Wars players would try to recruit the best players of Mafia 2 to join their mobs. Players of Mafia 2 would subscribe to a handful of Mafia Wars players, who would become the warring Dons of their game world, and the missions they were sent on would have meaningful repercussions in their worlds. As one Mafia Wars Don rises to power, his influence cascades throughout the game worlds of his subscribers. As other Dons rise to challenge him, Mafia 2 players find themselves embroiled in the familial intrigue of the best mafia fiction - contracted to protect, bribed to betray, or tasked to assassinate based on the real needs of real players (who would in fact be playing a different, but connected, game).

Unlike the Extreme Pong example, the beauty of this intramedia link between two different games connected via the cloud is that players on both sides of the line know there are other players out there returning their volley. At the same time, because the players operating at the Mafia Wars level are not tied to the minute to minute play the way Commanders are in Battlefield 2, they can appreciate the game at the pace of a social, bite-sized, mobile game.

Even more important is the bridge-building between two divergent audiences. The overlap in the Venn Diagram between Mafia Wars players and Mafia 2 players is probably not great, but then neither is the overlap being proposed between their games. Your Uncle Bob from Wisconsin who plays Wii Sports with you every Thanksgiving at Grandma's probably loves Mario Puzo books and clicks away at Mafia Wars three or four times a day between meetings, and would love nothing more than to have you as his man on the ground in his ongoing feud with Mike from Accounting. And with every click the decisions he makes in his game world could be changing the landscape in yours, and vice versa.

Citizen Naruto

So back at Christmas 2007, I snagged a copy of my studio's Naruto game - Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (not our more recent sequel Naruto: The Broken Bond, which by all accounts is even better). I finally got around to playing it a bit, and honestly, I'm really enjoying it.

Consider first that, as I have said many times in the past, I am actually really bad at videogames. Due to this, fighters are my bane. I honestly do not believe that I have ever in my entire life won a single match in Street Fighter (sorry Sirlin). Fighters are just too demanding of twitch reflexes and an understanding of how to enter combos, and read an opponent's moves. I am literally unable to decypher the language of a fighter.

Consider also that I know nothing at all about Japanese Anime. I don't know Naruto from (some other famous anime character that I can't even name to complete the phrase).

So with those major strikes against the game right out of the gate, I'm happy to report that it's a really tight, well realized experience. I strongly suspect that if you are interested in Naruto, you'll really like this game a lot. As for whether or not you'll like it more or less than I do if you like fighting games, I can't answer that at all because I have no idea if it is a good fighting game or a bad one.

The most impressive thing about it is the design of the city itself. Anyone designing an open world should take a good look at this game to see how it is structured. It is possibly the most smartly designed open world city I have ever seen in a game.

Here's the Cole's Notes of why it's great:

First - it's not too big just for the sake of being big. Full stop.

Second, it has a credible population of ordinary townsfolk who go about their business believably. All of the townsfolk dislike you at the start, but one of your rewards as you progress is the admiration of the people. As you do missions and side quests and help people, you get them to switch from disliking you to liking you one villager at a time. Unfriendly villagers say mean things as you pass by, but if you interact with a friendly villager, he will give you directions to your current objective in the form of a little arrow on screen for a short while. What this means is that as you unlock more and more friendly villagers, you have this low-level assistance available to you more and more frequently. It's a really subtle and clever way to make it feel like you're winning the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Third - from a level design point of view, the village is really well thought out and put together. The village has four vertical layers to it. As you progress through the game and unlock new powers and abilities, you are afforded access to higher and higher levels of the city - each higher level connected more 'broadly' then the previous.

At the beginning of the game, you cannot even double jump, and you can only access the lowest level - the streets and the rooftops of a few single story buildings. But you quickly learn the major routes and the major landmarks and get a pretty solid understanding of the basic layout.

Soon you are able to double jump and to run vertically up walls a short distance. This gives you access to the rooftops of most of the buildings in the village and is a very liberating step up. You also gain access to the first set of roof-connecting cables that allow you to 'slide' between interconnected rooftops.

Eventually, you upgrade your wall-running ability and can access the third and fourth vertical layers. The lowest level of cabling is the densest, connecting the most buildings with the shortest cables. The second level of cabling is sparser, connecting fewer buildings, but with longer cables. The highest level of cabling is the most sparse, connecting only a very few of the villages tallest structures.

Effectively these layered fast-travel networks allow you to 'climb up levels of movement heirarchy' giving you fewer degrees of freedom in your movement as you ascend, but giving you the ability to move much further and much faster the higher you go. It's really a fascinating topology.

The game has a really well thought-out economy and progression system as well. There are four currencies in the game: cash, coins, antique coins, and stars. Cash is the only unlimited resource and it is the resource you use to buy consumables (throwing knives, noodles, etc). Coins are (mostly) used to upgrade what you can carry - more knives, more noodles, etc). Antique coins upgrade the effects of your consumables (making all future knives purchased with cash into hardened knives or explosive knives or both). The stars are 'experience points' used to unlock and upgrade your personal abilities - combos and jutsus. Stars are doled out by missions. Both kinds of coins are collectibles (with the antique coins about 1/10th as common) and cash is given for just about everything.

The benefits of this system are obvious - it gives the designers the ability to maintain both limited economies (there are only so many abilties to unlock, hence a finite number of stars), and an open economy (once you have unlocked everything, you can still keep earning cash to buy more noodles to keep your health high - something which I desperately need). And further, by breaking the coins down into two separate limited economies, they alleviate decision stress on the player... not sure whether to save up 23 more coins to pay for that upgrade? You don't have to worry about it - the coin-based economy prices items in the 10's of coins and the antique coin economy prices things in the single units of antique coins (instead of in the 100s of standard coins). Very smart (unless of course, you are going for a more hardcore, more player-choice driven, and more consequential economy).

Anyway - I think the Naruto economy is fascinating and it taught me a lot about different concepts for game economies and I think it's worth a look.

There are also a few things I don't like.

First - I really don't understand the side-mission structure, as simple as it is. In the very beginning of the game, I am told that 'noddle delivery side missions' are unlocked. So I go do some. They are fun, easy, and help you learn the city. Then shortly thereafter, they tell you that races are unlocked, and also that hide-and-seek games are unlocked.

However - when you go to try and do a race or a hide-and-seek game, you cannot. The mission-givers tell you you need to train more - but I spent at least 4 hours (!) playing the game, doing missions, training and buying and unlocked new things before I was actually able to DO one of these supposedly 'unlocked' side-missions. Then - arbitrarily - the missions lock again after a few and you are told 'you need to train first'... but of course, I had no idea what I needed to train in or how, and went another couple of hours before being able to do these missions again.

I understand the notion of wanting to tease the player forward -but you need to tease the player forward with an IMMINENT reward, not one that they may unlock sometime this week. Additionally, by unlocking and relocking the side-missions, you end up playing two different games in parallel - you play a game where there are bunches of side missions and collecting to do - then you finish it all, and play a game of doing main missions until the side-missions are arbitrarily re-unlocked, then you switch back. It's weird. I would much prefer to just do side missions as they suit my whim.

Also - and this is probably the shelf moment for me - I am about halfway through the main story missions and a strange icon appeared on my health/chakra HUD following a major battle with a boss. This icon capped my health and chakra at 500 each, when formerly they were both around 1000. There is no explanation anywhere of what happened to cause it, or how I get rid of it (or even if I can)... I don't even know what it is or what it means - but it has stripped away fully 1/3rd of my power... and I am certainly not a good enough player to make due.

In both cases - the inexplicable locking and unlocking of side-quests and the bizarre 'capping' of my two main combat stats - are simply not explained, leaving me frustrated. Not only is it not explained to me what I need to do to continue forward and/or solve the problem, or when or if I might expect plot progression to solve the problem automatically, it is not even explained to me what the problem is - these impediments are just arbitrary.

Anyway - I still enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit, and for the city structure alone, I once again recommend it to anyone interested in a rock-solid level design for an open world.

If the two problems mentioned above have been ironed out in the sequel, I'll definitely be picking it up.

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).

Gamasutra Interview

So immediately following my GDC presentation, I did an interview with Bonnie Ruberg from Gamasutra, which is now up on their site. It goes into a few more details about the talk, and Bonnie also asked a few good questions about gender issues in exploration... some stuff I hadn't thought much about.