Framing and Playing

“The cake is a lie.” This reminds me of the use of “(All statements within this frame are untrue. I love you. I hate you.)” in Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” The cake is not a lie! Or is it? You never actually get the cake… Was the cake for you? Is the cake a lie? I’m also pretty sure GLaDOS also loves us and hates us and neither of these statements are true. The wording sets up an ironic and perhaps unintended dynamic comparison to Epimenides’ paradox.

Bateson discusses metacommunication, the exchange of signals that carry messages, in regards to the almighty “This is play,” which really means, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.”

When I was a little kid, my dad came home with something hidden under his jacket for my younger brother and I—a puppy! Yay! Only it turned out this puppy was a mix of wolf and Siberian Husky (mostly wolf), and play easily turned into real actions. She’d nip playfully sometimes, and at others turn play into a conflict of dominance. I solved this by biting her on the back of the neck during one of these play sessions turned alpha tests, and she didn’t ever bite me again. My brother, who was maybe five at the time, wasn’t as wild as me, and he almost got mauled. Yeah, we didn’t have a wolf anymore after that.

This serves to say that play fits into this paradigm of metacommunication and complexity of signals beyond our basic mood-signals, a sort of practice or testing of where we stand with one another at any given time.

In “Frames and Games,” Gary Alan Fine adds to this with: “… human beings reside in finite worlds of meaning, and individuals are skilled in juggling these worlds” (579). He pulls from Goffman’s idea that social worlds constitute frames of experience. To pull this to games and this immersion in fantasy of play, then, “In fantasy gaming the relationship between the meaning of an action within the game and the natural interaction is closer” (581).

This form of framing is mostly relevant for role-playing games, where the game world is the dominant reason for playing, players must deal with the game context, and players not only manipulate characters, but they are characters. This is the case even moreso for games that aren’t determined by the game system, but by a game master in real time where suspension of disbelief and immersion is essential to keep the players “in character,” or as Fine says, “down-keyed” rather than “up-keyed.” Certainly game designers can be compared to a game master, but the situation is much different when the game world exists visually (often in 3D).

The challenge, then, is to be your character when still balancing the different frames of the game world and your own knowledge of, for example, physics or history. I tried tabletop role-playing a few times, and here’s where I’d blow it. It’s easy for me to get immersed in a MMO chatbox and all the 3D graphics and even go to the length of running live events or writing stories about my characters in a message board (yes, I’m a freakin’ geek), but I can’t do it as easily in-person without any visual or audio representation of the game space. There might be concept sketches, or a game rule book with drawings of weapons and other objects, but the immersion flies out the window for me when I hear the game master’s voice telling us we’re out in the woods at night and there are some sounds around our campsite. Either that, or I’m just not as interested in the fantasy/medieval mishmash time period, but would be able to get more interested in something post-apocalyptic or futuristic, where my sense of reality has to be further skewed.

Then again, maybe I’m just prone to constantly remind myself—hey, this isn’t real. And give a good bite on the back of the neck just to prove that point and move on.

Glimmers of Narrative

So here we go, banging out a few points of perspective on narrative from various game scholars. Now, I’ll start with Jenkins, for the sake that I too have been accused of being a “narratologist” for using Jenkins as a reference in papers. Accused, I say, because that’s how it feels—you dirty, dirty narrative person who doesn’t understand what games are about at all. Well, hey, I’m a game writer, gotta give some credit to the fact that I see narrative elements in various forms. Pardon me! That doesn’t mean I’m not capable of understanding game mechanics, and that doesn’t mean narrative doesn’t influence mechanics.

Henry Jenkins does a great job of bringing up factors like “micronarratives” and embedding vs. embodiment vs. emerging vs. enacting forms of play in his “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” article. Interestingly, there has been a recent discussion on the IGDA Game Writing SIG mailing list concerning the job title “Narrative Designer.” Jenkins’ description of a game designer as a narrative architect overlaps quite a bit with this Narrative Designer position. Stephen Dinehart at Relic describes it this way:

“Narrative Designers are storytellers whom live alongside a game as it develops through the production process. As the project grows and alters over the course of production, Narrative Designers make sure the story maintains continuity throughout the experience. They are managers, writers, game designers, artists, and more. The pillar of their primary tenant must be founded on a transparent blend between narratological and ludological tendencies within interactive experience design. Simply put the balance of play and story.

A Narrative Designer should understand the whole product, and that doesn’t mean just talking about the story. Like any good Hollywood Director they need to know the entire game production pipeline so that one may intimately understand the implementation of said narrative elements for which they will be responsible. That said it’s a new field, it’s ripe for exploration and definition.”

On this note of considering the industry job of a game writer, the work of scholars like Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern can be, at times, threatening, since they call for the use of AI in narrative to enhance dramatic arcs and interaction with the narrative of a story. However, I think we’re a very far ways away from any AI being able to self-generate appropriate content. Everything needs to be programmed and accounted for in advance, which means there’s a role for a writer to aid the depth of character in dialogue form. Not that I enjoy writing AI barks in Excel sheets—that’s by far not my favorite part of the job. The direction of these character-oriented games would call for a different structure though, taking into consideration all of the possible conversations, but not making them active based on a simple “yes/no” branch in the plot of the game.

As Mataes points out, “… strongly authored stories whose path and outcome depend on player interaction are not currently on active line of exploration in commercial game design” (644). Sure, we can co-author stories in MMOs and construct stories out of our gameplay experience, but again, interactive drama has not been brought about to its fullest in the way Brenda Laurel might envision. She suggests, instead of looking to literary narrative structures with description, extensification, episodic structure, games benefit more from a dramatic narrative structure of enactment, intensification, and unity of action.

Ultimately, they are looking for games where the player has many opportunities to change many aspects of the story. This is not to say that all games should be this way though. I want to be very clear that I respect all varieties of games and my purpose as a game writer is to see where I best fit in the game development process, whether it be for writing background story, cutscenes, dialogue, plot progression, AI barks, or just instructions in the best possible manner and nothing more. There are many varieties of games, and this dramatic narrative form is just one of many possibilities.

Sure, I want story in games, believable characters, something immersive that keeps me invested not just in the game mechanics but the story-oriented purpose to playing—but that’s my th’ang. There are times I’m in the mood for MMOing it up and being social, times where I just want to do a quick TextTwist or online poker game without real stakes, times I want to oo and ahh over the Next Gen console games, and times I want to bang a fake drum set that matches up with color patterns on a rolling screen. Narrative has a unique role in each of these, but so does the gameplay. Without proper attention to mechanics and the actual play, story depth won’t be able to save the game.

What projects like Façade are trying to show is a new kind of mechanic with interactive narrative and drama in mind, but the game-like qualities have far to go just yet, if they even want to make games. In most cases, it’s about a different form of interaction. It calls for what Chris Crawford pointed out to me during the Northwest Games Festival in Portland, Oregon—that games are one thing underneath a larger umbrella of interactive media.

Assassin’s Creed

Pardon me for the less blog-like writing style of this round. I’m clearly channeling my academic and journalist sides while flashing back to a presentation I attended at E3.

“We had nothing except a way of doing things,” said Patrice Desilets, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal, as he introduced the background of the then-named Project Assassin on the Cracking the Code of Creativity panel at E3 2006. Previously, the core team behind Assassin’s Creed had worked on games with existing Intellectual Property, namely Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Desilets saw originality as an opportunity, and the team studied and researched based on inspiration from historical accounts of assassins during the Crusades.

Desilets expressed an interest in bringing historical accuracy into video games: “It’s important to capture the reality of the medieval times and our own history—our own history is much larger than games currently represent.” However, it quickly became clear to the team that their target audience, the 18-to-35-year-old male bracket, had a varied understanding of this history, as pointed out by Desilets: “In focus groups when we went and asked what the Crusades are, responses were all over the place.”

Once the main concept idea of playing as an assassin during the Crusades formed, the team didn’t see a choice in where to go, but instead focused on how to get the gameplay they wanted. “At an early stage we wanted to do a mature game—something real; real human behaviors in an action adventure,” emphasized Desilets. He later added, “We knew the characters had to be really fluid, level design was the key, and graphics had to be up to par, but then we had to come up with something new.”

Prior, Desilets suggested implementing the Sands of Time rewind and replay feature and removal of the checkpoint and save game system for all games universally, but it became clear that it would be too difficult for engineers to ensure this feature across Next-Gen consoles. Left with the responsibility to innovate within the Project Assassin gameplay, the team set out to prototype the experience they were going for. “The design was all about the character and interaction with environment, and how you translate that into your controller,” Desilets stated.

What resulted was an interesting take on the background story as well as narrative and interactive role of the main player character to legitimize the unrealistic abilities to restart failed missions, save the game, and re-spawn that would otherwise detach the player from immersion in the gameplay. In doing so, Assassin’s Creed intertextualizes the gamer’s self-positioning in similar action adventure genre games.

Reworking of the Sands of Time game mechanics are clearly seen in Assassin’s Creed–there is an emphasis on the ability to climb smoothly up buildings and leap from certain positions. Like the other Prince of Persia games before it, Assassin’s Creed is a spin-off from the 3D platformer genre combination. If you can look beyond the graphics and to the structure of the environment, you will immediately understand the game as a revised platformer in 3D graphics. Assassin’s Creed does more than the Prince of Persia series though, as it combines other forms of interaction with non-player characters, such as colliding, talking, and avoiding.

However, variety in the locations of these interactions has more room to build on. Essentially, you repeat the same actions over and over. Combat in the city against guards when caught is dependent primarily on a strategy of deflection, and as much as you do have a choice in your actions, specialization is narrow. This might not be as noticeable in a world that appears to promise less interaction, so here Assassin’s Creed simply sets up the player with such amazing physics, graphics, and possible interactions that it then appears to fall short in gameplay where other games may not.

Obviously there will be an Assassin’s Creed 2, so this leaves me expecting to see what the team can do to improve player agency. While the player can physically move during cutscenes, this is simply lifted from Half Life, and only creates the illusion of control. Further, variety in environments and progressive steps is key. Otherwise, the player is hung up on spending too much time exploring without new content to appreciate (Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of a game which successfully uses environment exploration due to its variety in scenery) and not enough time actually assassinating (often also hindered by more cutscenes to show the player the plot point he/she has reached).

Beautiful game, incredible physics, interesting intertextuality of the gamer’s role–now let’s see what they do next with an engine they better understand and more time to develop on an established IP.

Majestic Lessons Learned

Majestic has been called a great failure, and I’m with that line of thinking. Christy Dena, who is working on a PhD and researches largely in the area of cross-media entertainment, pointed me to two references: Dave Szulborski’s ‘A Majestic Failure?’ in This is Not a Game (2005) and Carol Handler Miller in ‘Digital Storytelling’ (2004). I’ll quickly point to the factors both authors referenced, on the negative and positive side:

Issues:
Postponed – Not only did it launch after the expected date and thus lost marketing drive, but it also launched after The Beast and was thus compared a great deal. On top of that, it released after 9/11 (‘nuff said).
USARG – It was only available in the US, also an issue for the post 9/11 atmosphere.
Mystique – They were out about being a game, which may have ruined believability.
Mon’ay, Mon’ay, Mon’ay! – There was a subscription fee. To be specific, a $10 fee per month for an average of 15 minutes of gameplay per day.
Inflexible/Inactive –They ran in a disjointed episodic form that insisted on being linear, despite time lapses in gameplay.
I Feel Alone – It was single-player.
I Feel Invaded – Some of the play was too invasive, like phone calls at home.
I Feel Useless – The player had no collaborative effect on the story. The puzzles were difficult and there was little reward for solving them.
I Feel Confused – Interface elements mixed fictional and real links, and features like chatbots that weren’t actually real.

However!:
Shiny – There were well-produced game assets.
I’m Shiny Too – Players made numerous fan sites, including biographies and sub-ARGs.
Not Too Inflexible – Some fan fiction was used in the plot of the game.
I Feel Enlightened – The plot, although linear, had interesting twists with a mixture of reality and fiction.
I Think That’s Real – The chatbots did feel realistic and inspired later work in bot engines.

Overall, the game failed commercial, but it also failed in balancing the game design in terms of pace and story to keep both “casual” and “hardcore” players involved equally. A developer of Majestic, Greg Gibson, speaks more on this in a blog comment, which Andrea Phillips linked me to. He is an invaluable resource for understanding ARG design. Even though, yes, Majestic was a failure, it was a great one. The lessons learned help those of us developing ARGs now.

I am currently working on a project for the Aboriginal Media Lab, which, since it’s an ARG, I can’t say much about. I am very aware of concerns with the Aboriginal community, such as creating a safe environment that other players can’t take advantage of to cause any harm during gameplay. We plan not to be so invasive, but rather use email, web sites, Facebook, and YouTube to integrate technology. Primarily, we are concerned about our live events and the activities we are having our players get into for the game.

Puzzles are often a hindrance in ARGs, so we’re simply dropping those. There’s nothing directly to “solve,” but rather mysteries and clues that will permeate Vancouver, British Columbia and spaces online in relation to the story. Squamish language will be used, but we see this as integration with the storyline, not as language puzzles that need to be solved in order to progress the plot. Rather, the plot will move as we do with players influencing the progression of the story but not of the major events. I know that players of Majestic felt they didn’t influence the plot enough, so this is a point of concern for me, but our audience will largely be unique from typical ARG players. We’re targeting community member (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal), city planners, college students, and hope to satisfy the ARG playing community online.

Essentially, this ARG is based around non-profit fundraising and demonstrating how the ARG model can be used for facilitating Aboriginal knowledge and community development in the areas of health, economy, and education.

All of this sounds very dry since I’m not giving out the theme or content, but we’re putting a lot of good ol’ NDN humor in there. It’s all about having fun in the name of promoting Aboriginal knowledge in plants, medicines, good food, and all their traditional uses. Grandmother plants and grandfather rocks getting attention in Vancouver and hopefully in other areas depending how far the internet-focused gameplay extends. The collaborative creation of the technological medicine wheel, inspired by the work of Squamish herbalist and new media artist Cease Wyss.

One thing’s for sure—no subscription fee.

Into the Matrix, And Out Again

With such a damaged franchise at the time, The Matrix Online MMO was met with mediocre beta reviews, but fan culture persisted in giving it a shot and making their own extensions of the game.

Instead of just relying on reviews from journalists, I asked an online gaming community for feedback from players who had personal experience with the game. One respondent had played The Matrix Online for three months with his best friend.

“The one thing I can give kudos to is the storyline staff. They were an excellent bunch of people who played their characters wonderfully. For those who didn’t play the game, most of the high-ranking persons in the organizations (Ghost and Niobe, the Merovingian and Persephone, and the Agents, for example) were played by actual people who, like other players, could be talked to, interacted with, and so on. I remember one time I sent a tell to one of the Agents that was online on my server at the time and was quite surprised to have him message me back.”

Immediately, I thought, “Woah, that’s gotta cost a lot of money.” I remember writers from Asheron’s Call talking about how costly it was to do the same thing, as much as it did enrich the player experience. Even Ultima Online originally had more live events and “game masters” who would appear in different forms to interact with players spontaneously. In later years, it really fell on the players to construct these enjoyable event experiences.

“Missions simply became repetitive to a great degree – objectives recycled, interiors of buildings recycled, enemies recycled, etc – that it just became boring really fast. I usually did group missions with some friends I met in the game because at least you could entertain yourself with some conversation while grinding.”

Even the combat didn’t fit, a “rock-paper-scissors” style of choosing moves, despite the ability to level in all classes and skills given enough resources. The resource system revolved around bits of data, just the same method of resource collection disguised in a new context.

Much like Diablo, where you have to activate teleportation locations outside of town to be able to access them in town, The Matrix Online had a similar system for their hardlines/telephone booths. This became an element of fun in exploration for my respondent:

“Each zone in the other three areas was a restricted area that, if you lingered around for too long in, the Super Agents would find you and eventually kill you (I refer to them as Super Agents because regular Agents found in missions were killable and the like; these were DEFINITELY not). Each zone, however, had an access node somewhere – in an alley, on a rooftop, anywhere – that once activated allowed you safe travel throughout that one zone (but not any other zone in that area of the city; each zone beacon needed activation individually). I don’t know how many people liked doing that, but I liked hopping from rooftop to rooftop looking for those things, killing gangsters and trying to get it before they got me.”

Eventually, both him and his friend quit, because there just wasn’t enough to do except grind mindlessly when there weren’t live events going on. Coming from an industry side of things, I know how pricey it is to even hold live events just due to staff costs. They needed to focus more on mechanics first, then interaction with players.

WoW only gets away with the grind because the community is so massive and there are numerous quest types scattered throughout each level. Even though you know it’s the same quest pattern, you can justify it by the vast amount of quests to do. When you hit level 70, the game changes completely, and you either need to make an alt to go back to the immediate satisfaction of the grind or shift your thinking to item obsession. Gear, gear, gear. An MMO without boring missions? Now that would be something. Guild Wars may come close to this in later levels. We just need something like that available on both PC and Mac to maximize player base.

Dancing with the Stars

But not Mario stars, oh no. I’m not sure that Dancing with the Stars for the Wii is even worth the time it takes to critique it, but okay, here we go. To pull again from Doug Church, who points out that at the very least, players should know what to expect of a game based on the design and gradually learn what you can do in the world, this game completely misses that point in the entire concept itself. You don’t actually dance in this game. You move your hands and shake them around or wave them sometimes.

Then, it’s not even intuitive. On the screen when you just jump into play, it doesn’t say anywhere you have to hold down the B and Z buttons. You only find that out in the tutorial. Come on! Wii games should at least be easy to learn without even looking at the tutorial mode. The icons of the controllers should’ve had the B and Z buttons highlighted when it’s time to press them.

All that aside, it was fun watching David and Nis do the mashed potato. The one saving grace is the party possibility of the game, but even then, there are plenty of other much better Wii games out there, and they offer multiplayer co-op and competitive options (Wii Sports, Playground).  I’ll hold out for Wii Fit, which doesn’t necessarily promise to rapidly burn calories, but it does have yoga and balance elements I’d love to do along with the Wii Sports fitness tests.

Goodbye WoW

I’m not saying goodbye forever. I’m just really busy right now. I have other places to be, other work to do, other games to play. This World of Warcraft is too much of a separate world for me.

Edward Castronova refers to Norrath (EverQuest) as a meeting place, market place, and home in “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.” It’s interesting to see someone combine journal entries of playing EverQuest with such thorough statistical breakdowns of a game. I’m glad someone has done it, because it proves there is real world monetary value in games, and I don’t have to do the research. There has been later work in this area, and I know of a good friend, Darius Kazemi, who has made a career out of tracking player activities (gameplay metrics) for MMO companies.

The same EBaying trends of games like EverQuest and Ultima Online have followed through with WoW. I remember liquidating my UO account back at a time when I really figured the game was beaten to death for sure, and even then, I was able to sell off my houses, characters, and possessions for a good bit of real money (around $500). Minus the months of subscription fees.

Where MMOs really grab me is in the persistence. Accessible any time, excluding downtime for server work. A world where “… survival and success of an avatar depends on its ability to deal with merchants and defend itself from monsters” (819).

I really miss UO. Whenever I play WoW, I’m trying to get that feeling back. But I’ve hit level 70, and there’s not much else to do but obsess over getting better gear so I can… what? Survive in an instance of a dungeon to get more better gear? That I can’t even dye or change the look of in any kind of way?

I’d consider myself a mix of the “achiever” and “socializer” from Richard Bartle’s breakdown of player types in “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who Suit MUDs.” He identifies key play styles: achievement within the game context, exploration of the game, socializing with others, and imposition upon others. I believe his MUD player categories translate well to MMO players, but also that there are tendencies to cross over between different play styles.

I grind, grind, grind. Master the grinding, socialize in guild chat (WoW is just a visual chat box after all), and then wonder what I’ve wasted all of my time on. In UO, I got to make custom items, dye my clothes, and look unique. Not to mention decorate a house. In WoW, it’s about being identified as having the best equipment available at any given level for a certain class and spec of skills.

I’m not sure where my activities in UO would really fall. In UO, items could remain on the ground out of your inventory for a while before the server refreshed and deleted any unowned items. Players could put decorations of all sorts made out of all kinds of items on the ground at cities, popular banks, or just as part of role-playing around a small group of people. While the economy in WoW is rich and built around the auction house system, certain rules really prevent EBay trade, like items that bind with the character on pickup so they can’t give them to another character. UO, on the other hand, was much more freeform in trade. Since items would fall off of a character if they were overweight, those of us who were a bit more devious would hang out at banks waiting for some poor ignorant person to accidentally overload themselves and drop a pile of gold or bag of nice items that we could snatch up real fast. Okay, I guess sometimes I fit into the “Killer” MUD category that’d probably transfer over to a MMO scheme as “Griefer.”

But as far as where I lean most, and what keeps me in games, the socializer tag nails me. I have no doubt that I still have a WoW account because I can play with my husband and colleagues at SFU, and I’m in the TerrorNova guild. But I’m always hoping there will be a MMO with less grinding and more customizability out (and also available on Mac) some day soon. Although that would be bad, since my work would probably suffer.

Wha’ You Sayin’?

Ain’t that the truth. Doug Church in “Formal Abstract Design Tools” addresses the need for a common language among game designers, since “… design evolution lags far behind the evolution of overall game technology” (367). The more I dip past game writing into game design, the more I appreciate breakdowns like Church’s. His work was later added to, preliminarily discussed in “Game Design Methods: A 2003 Survey.” On the same note, though, game design patterns and the 400 Rules project can also be layered over FADT.

Since this paper was so preliminary, it only focused on three FADTs:

Intention: Making an implementable plan of one’s own creation in response to the current situation in the game world and one’s understanding of the game play options.

Perceivable Consequence: A clear reaction from the game world to the action of the player.

Story: The narrative thread, whether designer-driven or player-driven, that binds events together and drives the player forward toward completion of the game.

The only one I have an issue with is his definition of story, since he doesn’t take into consideration the difference between narrative and story, which can be further broken down by research like Henry Jenkins’ concepts of micronarratives.

A designer should be concerned with “… knowledge of how the world works, how they can move and interact with it, and what obstacles they must overcome” (371). This really fits into Jenkins’ view of game designers as game architects. We’re designing this space, this experience.

Church adds: “I believe the challenge and promise of computer game design is that our most important tools are the ones that involve and empower players to make their own decisions” (379). That, and that you’re aware of not upsetting the player by setting up negative feedback for their decisions in a way that doesn’t make sense. For example, Church talks about Mario, and points out “if something exists in the world, you can use it” (372). I know how frustrating it is for me in a role-playing game when there are buildings with doors you can’t open and no explanation as to why. You’re suddenly very aware that the buildings are probably just exterior models and the game loses life, which is especially a problem for the RPG genre.

Speaking of RPG design, Church points out: “This year’s real-time strategy (RTS) clearly built on last year’s RTS games. And that will continue, because design vocabulary today is essentially specific to individual games or genres. You can talk about balancing each race’s unit costs, or unit count versus power trade-offs. But we would be hard pressed to show many examples of how innovations in RTS games have helped role-playing games (RPGs) get better. In fact, we might have a hard time describing what could be shared” (368).

I’ve run into this very problem right now working on a design for a game based on the Doig First Nation cultural archives. On the one side, I have a request for resource management as a core mechanic (in a way that screams map RTS), and on the other, rich stories and characters they want available as the player’s role. There’s not much in the area of crossing these genres, but by using FADT as opposed to a structure that’s more specific to genre, I can at least construct an understanding of how RTS and RPG genres relate and what mechanics I can keep and cut. In a way, it may make a new kind of genre in the way the game is played, determined entirely by the mechanics that emerge from Indigenous content in game design. More on this later as I get into further design stages.

This Is Not Fun

I finally got a DS Lite for Christmas. I rarely ask for gifts for myself, but this time I knew I wanted an upgrade. Slick black case, backlighting, smooooth. I also asked for a poker game, and got the World Tournament version. And damn it’s ridiculously hard.

In the article “Game Theory,” William Poundstone outlines a history behind the “Theory of Parlor Games” paper from von Neumann with an explanation of the “minimax theorum” and its importance to mathematicians. Originally, “… Borel posed the basic questions of game theory: for what games is there a best strategy, and how does one find such a strategy?” (386). Although I wish I could use this to figure out how to best defeat other players at poker, what’s happened in the case of this DS game is that all the AI seems to be built around this zero-sum competitive game system where the players are all trying to make the most logical decision towards winning.

Since “game theory is about perfectly logical players interested only in winning” (389), I question its emphasis on this “perfectly logical” play. Is that really fun? So far, games take way too long to play at a casual level for a DS, and I’m missing all of the human interaction of trying to guess if someone is bluffing based on gestures or facial expressions.

Meanwhile, we have classic games like Centipede, where the emphasis is on easy-to-learn simple play. Your opponent is the system, and escalating tension follows peaks and valleys throughout play, which goes back to LeBlanc’s dramatic game dynamics. Richard Rouse III in “Game Analysis: Centipede” calls Centipede a prime example of game design because of its precisely balanced gameplay and mechanics. Strategy isn’t about trying to calculate every possible move from the “opponent,” but rather about minimizing to the most effective move on your own part. For example, since the player quickly finds out the centipede splits when shot in the middle, a logical response is to shoot the head or tail.

With infinite play, multiple lives, and a high score system, Centipede is easy to get into and equally easy to leave with an added adrenaline rush from the tension. These are the kind of games that fit the DS system. Something more like Geometry Wars, where even though you obviously know you are playing against a computer, you don’t feel as if the system is taking advantage of sophisticated abilities to, for example, card count in poker.

I just get too impatient. I don’t have two hours to win one game in a poker tournament. But this is why I was the person who got us all playing for pretzels at the Indie Games Conference when someone had forgotten to bring their chips. To me, poker is about the fun of being around other people, and you just can’t get that in the kind of AI available today.

Oasis

I remember Oasis as this PC game I always see in the bargain area with just a flap cover on it. I’ve always been intrigued—I have a weakness to engaging easy-to-learn/fun-to-play games (casual games, ha)—but haven’t actually seen the gameplay until a recent class where David introduced us to it.

Marc LeBlanc, who is behind numerous game titles including Oasis, also wrote “Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics.” In it, he poses: “As game designers, how do we go about the task of creating dynamic games? What tools can we use to guarantee a climactic struggle?” (440).

He suggests that mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics are the basic breakdowns for game design, and if you can create balanced dramatic tension, you’ll keep the player interested. Games can evoke drama through feedback systems related to uncertainty and inevitability. So how does he apply this to his own design of Oasis?

In Oasis, a kind of Minesweeper meets resource management game with impending combat, the goal of the game is to discover cities, connect cities, and defend against barbarians within a certain number of turns. Other side goals include extra points like discovering (i.e. uncovering the tiles of) a whole oasis and mining mountains. You don’t actually lose the level if barbarians destroy all of your cities, but you don’t get any city saving points, the barbarian forces grow stronger, and you can lose alliances with other societies.

LeBlanc uses uncertainty a great deal in Oasis. “Escalation” is employed by the increase in number of cities, discoverable tiles, and sizes of oases for every level, which raises the stakes in points. “Fog of war” is a core mechanic, since the whole set up for the player is to discover what is beneath blank tiles with numbered hints to find cities are nearby (Minesweeper style). Your character can leap from tile to any tile depending on if there are mountains in the way. The biggest threat to look out for is where the barbarians are located on the map in order to make an educated guess about which city they might attack first for funneling your followers into defense wisely. Each level is an illusion of “cash out” (score resets to zero), although points accrue to your overall score over every level.

To get more followers, you need to explore. You need followers to build roads between the cities to prepare for defense against the barbarians. Placement and movement is a nonreversible process, what LeBlanc categorizes as a tension creator in inevitability. The uncovering of tiles and the literal limit in number of moves before the barbarians attack represents the “ticking clock”. Followers, cities, and mines are a nonrenewable resource, although I’ve never played a level where I felt I got all the followers available by uncovering the entire map. This nonrenewable resource factor really plays into tension when the barbarians attack and you see numbers represent their people versus your defense people. As the barbarians attack a city, numbers go down for every death on each side, and whoever has the remaining survivors at the end wins. You can’t interrupt play at this point and your sense of winning or losing becomes quite inevitable as the followers and barbarians face off.