Wonderland

Dirolab

I've often lamented the lack of the Romance genre in videogames, if only because it really feels like a yawning gap when you see how huge the genre is in TV, Film, Books, Magazines, Theatre, Opera, Art...

So why is it quite so missing in videogames? Lumping Romance with Sex / Porn, I mean, sure - Kratos has fantasy threesome sex offscreen. There's Leisure Suit Larry. Plenty of hentai stuff that doesn't turn up on your average "videogames" search. Tons of crappy XXX dot exes out there.

Then there are just lovely, tiny, bits of romance within many Japanese RPGs - Final Fantasy, and I'm enjoying the little bits present in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon at the moment (again, third playthrough!). Some very boiled-down to the basics stuff in The Sims.

But it's a pretty empty genre overall. Someone very wise once said to me, when we were discussing this problem:

Games, I believe, are about agency. Not always choice, but certainly a
form of agency or control. And so in games where romance is a
narrative device, it's going to get problematic if I (the player)
disagree with my character's romantic interest. "Yes, I know that the
linear arc of the game is going to make me ('Bella') sleep with
Edward, but I ('Tom') think he's a manipulative fuck!". I would want
to fight the game arc then.

There's a lot more too, to say on the subject: reading and watching romance is one thing, but playing it? Interactively?

So it's with joy that I hear that the megabrains of MARTIN HOLLIS - yes, GoldenEye Martin - and JANE PINCKARD - yes, gamegirladvance Jane - have decided to work it out and chronicle attempts in the field.  With friends.

Have a look: DiRoLab, the Digital Romance Lab.

100 years of children's games

PLAYTIMES is a resource from the British Library, the result of a couple of years' of playground research, much digitisation of material, a documentary, and a Wii/Kinect game (prototype?).

The ‘Children’s Games and Songs’ project aims to preserve children’s games and songs as an important aspect of our national culture; but also seeks to explore how they continue to be a part of the lives of children living in the age of computer games and the internet. What does this oral tradition borrow from the media; and how might it connect with the entertainment and information technologies of the age of new media?

A nice resource for play designers, I think.

(Via @museumsetc.)

Volunteer for Victory

Pretty, huh?

Incidentally, Left 4 Dead has twice the returns on an Etsy search that Farmville does. I heart the Etsy crowd.

 

GDC 2011

GDC: worth its weight in gold. It's a long way to go, and all that - and there are after all closer ones - but the SF yearly event really is worth every penny that it takes to get there.

When I started going, it was mainly AAA development, for the most part, but there were also interesting fringe events in the educational stream, casual games, indie (tiny), etc. From (poor) memory, the period of, say, 2005-7 was getting more indie, and there was definitely a big bump in things like serious games for defense, and similar. Triple-A was still at the top; casual games were showing indications of what they might become.

Then 2009 and Farmville happened, and - I believe - claimed the biggest single gameplaying audience ever, much to the astonishment of pretty much everyone. Sure, there were indications, and sure, we'd been talking about all the factors that led to Farmville for quite a few years, but I doubt anyone saw the sheer size of the playing audience coming. And it seemed like a tidal wave: practically overnight.

Fast forward to 2010: the Farmville/social games backlash is in full effect, lots of negativity. Not surprisingly: the games were pretty poor back then, and pretty transparently designed to part the player from their coin in a way that felt somewhat like the Find the Queen game at the funfair. Like someone knew how dim you, the player, were, and was happily fleecing you.

This year, so different already. There's still polarity - Iwata-san complaining about the quality of social games; Brenda Brathwaite Ranting about the untapped potential of social games (I'm with her on this one). Most people seem to find themselves along the middle: social games are fine in principle, and getting much better, and there's still even better to come, but it's still a bit grim when money and punter are so visibly parted using elements like the Daily Spin. Gambling tactics are never going to taste sweet; a wretched hive of scum and villainy, etc.

Coupla things in summary:

I think Facebook MMOs, RPGs, and realtime strat games are about to proliferate. It'll be a while still for things like FPS or other more hardcore styles. But music too, and questing and strategy should all go down a treat; social games are training wheels, after all. (Maybe they are already and I haven't noticed!)

Facebook Credits: general consensus seems to be that they're a Good Thing for the most part, because they remove the problem of many 3rd party options to deal with. The downside: you can't use them off Facebook (so what about a transmedia or multiplatform game?), and you're dependent on Facebook once integrated. But then again, most devs are already dependent: Facebook is the gatekeeper.

The Platform Might Eat You. It's true that Facebook is the New gatekeeper. Gatekeepers have always been the caller of shots: broadcasters, newspapers, etc. And they can both make and break you. Many indies stood up for - or reminisced - about the freedom of being off Facebook, but it's also rare that an indie can reach an audience of significance without somehow being integrated with Facebook. Dan Cook did an excellent pres on this topic.

Google had a pretty significant presence. Both in TV apps (I don't have faith here: not until TV remotes become at the very least wiimotes, or the box ships with a kinect knockoff), and its App Engine was mentioned - positively - a few times.

Analysis and evidence-based design is also growing. There's been more discussion than ever on subjects like psychology, influence, A/B testing, data-watching/sampling/storytelling, user testing.. in short, where once design was a black art, now it's a measured art. There were stories of how game design can be "discovered": you can test for levels of fun, and add and remove as you go. Design emerges. Again, some people don't like this: won't some kind of special, maybe artistic or expressionist magic get missed with this technique?

(Every year, many attendees are felled by the infamous GDC lurgy. 18,000 people in one place, all that shared-screens finger-grease, communal controllers sweat, mmm. I've lasted years without being hit, but this year it got me, damnit. Back to bed.)

Raph's 40 social mechanics for social games

Raph Koster just explained how societies work, how humans work, and how we interact as beings with each other, described as social mechanics and how they could be applied (and are sometimes applied) in social games.

190 slides - I couldn't write what he said as he said it, but his slides will go up shortly on his site. UPDATE: ka-ching! Here the are.

Meanwhile, as a taster, his list of the 40 essential social mechanics that have ever existed, in order that game designers need never have to reinvent them again.

I hope I got that bit right ;-)

“I have 190 slides. This pres is largely a list. 40 mechanics used to create social activity in a game so you don’t have to design this stuff again.

Social games today are primarily single player experiences.

Social games are playing in parallel with people, or maybe collaboratively…”

#1: The simplest form of multiplayer is simple advice and assistance. How good are your channels for communication? Helping is the building block of all social gameplay.

Parallel symmetric games: darts, golf, snowboarding. You play alongside each other, comparing performance. Meausring progress against someone else is what makes it multiplayer.

#2: Quantifying achievement. Putting it into a database.

 #3. Races. The first user to reach a goal, wins. Curiously absent. Why not have races to a level? You can use this in a network setting. Social games don’t tend to use racing.

#4. Leaderboards: everyone competes asynchronously, parallel with historic attempts. We see this in neighbourbars.

#5: Tournaments: bracketing users. Social games tend to use bracketing for simple pvp matchmaking: it’s under utilised.

#6: Opposition. A rival good is something that can’t be used by someone else at the same time. You have my stuff, I can’t use it. Non-rival is stuff that clones itself: information, etc.

#7: Dot-eating. I ate it, you didn’t. Zero sum resource consumption.

#8: Tug of War. A winner and a loser.

#9: Handicapping.

#10: Secrets. Fog of War. Hands of cards.

#11: Last man standing. Deathmatch.

#12: Bidding. Mediated status. You bid, you take your rival goods (money) and whoever gets the thing, wins. Where are the silent auctions in social games?

#13: Lying. Deception and bluffing. Deception only works against other people; not a computer. We depend on quantifying things in our social games; the more we move into psychology the more we can leverage things like bluffing.

#14: 3^rd party Betting. Betting is driven by the human brain’s bug at calculating odds. We’re lousy at it. This only works on people; you can’t do it vs a cpu.

#15: prisoner’s dilemma. Players don’t have all the info, they’re on the same side. If either one caves, they both lose. If they both hang together, they will succeed. You don’t know if the other person will uphold their side. We currently don’t see this in social games. Yet.

#16: Kriegspiel. Tabletop military strategy, effectively. Creates the dungeonmaster, the gamemaster. A referee enforces the rules, a gamesmaster directs the action, directs the game. We don’t do much directing in social games right now, but we could.

#17: Roles. How many multiplayer games can you think of that don’t have positions on a team. We don’t use team roles or classes in social games. That’s fascinating. This one is guaranteed to increase retention.

#18: Ganging up. Being it. Hot potato, Tag. Victim & Hunter.

#19: Rituals. Role transitions: weddings, cut a cake, levelling, ding gratz. What is the social game equiv of attending the wedding? Shared rituals bind community like nothing else. The biggest thing that marks rituals is gifts. This one I’m happy to say, we’ve nailed.

#20: Gifts. This is moving a rivalrous good to another actor in order to increase their status bar. Gifts have a whole pile of embedded cultural practice. [note, I think #20 was titled gifts, I was momentarily distracted...]

#21: Reciprocity. Players will send what *they* want, as they know they’ll get it sent back to them.

#22: Mentoring / Twinking. When a hilev hands a lowlev a pile of stuff. It’s hugely welcoming. It’s not cheating, it's powerful social glue.

#23: Identity. Means of displaying your status inside a social context.

#24: Ostracism. Group removal. Denial of resources.

#25: Trust. Does your game call on your to trust someone you don’t know? 

#26: Guilds & tribes. Hugely powerful. Barely present in social games.

#27: Exclusivity. Velvet rope. VIP clubs. What could this do for your monetisation?

#28: Guild vs Guild. We know groups like to annihilate each other. Rivalry. Even in a farming game, you could have tropical vs temperate, and they will envy each other, and they will develop passion, and identity, and then…

#29: Trade. These large-scale structures become dependent upon each other. They’re less likely to quit. We haven’t focused on them selling things to one another…

You are shaping societies. You are building the things people play in, talk about, take part in. Be awake to this.

#30: Elections. The largest MMO in the world today is American Idol. Politics.

#31: Reputation, influence and Fame. Rolemodels for other players to follow or imitate. You can affect the way players behave by making them famous. Don’t publicis the griefers, publicise the wonderful ones.

#32: Public goods. Parks. Air. Is there an infinite common resource in your game?

#33: Tragedy of the Commons: can you use up your public good? The price of Facebook ads: the prices are going up, we’re driving those prices up, we're all affected...

#34: Community. Where we start playing games on you, the player. If you don’t have good facilities for community interaction, you miss out on the people who set the tone and opinion for everyone else. They’re the small squeaky wheel with enormous broadcast reach.

#35: Strategy Guide. Players are able to solve insane problems as a group via the scientific method. Every player is a fresh experiemtn trial run, they get better, they figure stuff out. But this only works at large scale with shared info.

#36: Teamwork. Groups operating together are more successful than those operating on their own. Dragon Kill Points.

#37: Arbitrage.

#38: Supply chains. Chain value, interdependence.

#39: User generated content. Design for this.

#40: Griefing. Change the rules out from under the players. Sometimes players are reinventing your game for you.

Wonderful stuff, as ever, goes without saying. Watch out for his slides, because not only is there more explanation, but also a bibliography!