gameslol

Some of my colleagues at NCsoft Europe created a series of videos to promote NCsoft’s presence at Leipzig Games Convention and the various fan contests/parties we’re having. Various people from around the office are starring in these videos, and I make two cameos as well.

I’m the confused guy appearing four times.

I’m the guitar guy at the end. I think the script for this one might have been a bit too long, but I love the cheesy acting and music!

Yeah.

“Massively singleplayer” is an apparent oxymoron that’s been floating around for a while. Will Wright has on occasion half-jokingly called Spore a massively singleplayer game because of how it spreads content amongst users. Other people have used the term to mock MMOs that can be played entirely without interacting with other players.

But could massively singleplayer be a real type of game? Actually, there are a number of games in which multiple people control the same avatar in the same game experience. In other words, singleplayer games that are played by lots of people simultaniously.

In fact, we have played such a game at Idle Thumbs, where forum user Erkki programmed a bot to play text adventures on the Idle Thumbs forums. Any registered forum user can become a player by posting a command in a thread, which the bot then interprets. It then replies with a response from the text adventure. You can read a playthrough of Zork here, or check out some coverage it got on Joystiq and GameSetWatch.

Of course, part of the fun is just messing around with the limitations of the game. It’s easy to take the game hostage by constantly attacking the nearest grue without weapons. But most of the time participants are genuinely working towards a shared goal.

Another wonderful example can be found in the monthly collaborative playthroughs of Civilization held on CivFanatics. One person is in charge of playing the game and posting screens of its current state, while dozens (possibly hundreds) of other forum users engage in elaborate bureacracies to collectively determine their next moves.

Each player has a different role within the player government, such as council member, or minister, or map maker, or embassador. Their forum interactions ultimately result in a single person executing their decisions and reporting back the results. In other words, massively singleplayer. (Or perhaps more accurately: massively co-op.)

This method of playing Civilization evolved over time. When I first saw it a couple of years ago, all participants on the forum were part of the same government. Currently the metagame has expanded to include four different governments competing in multiplayer mode. When a civilization is defeated, the players in its government become refugees and may be assimilated by the other governments. Various other such metagame rules have been established.

Both these examples have emerged from online communities. But could you design a game that already incorporates this concept in its core gameplay? Imagine playing an MMO version of Civilization where you can’t declare war without approval from the military advisor, who is an actual person. Or where trade negotiations are not with an AI, but involve talks between two delegations of actual players, each with their own negotiation skills and agendas.

Of course, this is just a ‘what if’ exercize. I don’t know if such a game would be actually viable. There might be far too many dependencies between players for it to work outside existing internet communities. But the thought of playing an MMO style game in a very cooperative way I personally find quite appealing. And that’s all I really have left to say for this post. Yeah.

What do you think? Does any of this make sense?

(P.S. I’m also reminded of a version of Pong in which players collectively control the two paddles and the game uses the average of all user input. Sadly I’m unable to find this Flash game anymore.)

This month I moved to the UK to work at NCsoft Europe, based in Brighton. I’ve joined their new internal development team, which is working on multiple unannounced games. I absolutely love the new job and the people who work at the company. Though to my surprise no one in the UK wears bowler hats and surprisingly few people eat marmite. Even the British weather has been somewhat acceptable so far… so what’s going on here?

Before crossing the channel I wrapped up my job at Woedend! in Amsterdam, where for the past few years I worked on (amongst many other things) several browser-based MMOs and many advergames. I especially did a lot of preproduction on a 3D browser MMO racing/rpg game with a really unique setting, which hopefully will get funding and enter production soon. There’s still some early demo videos here. My last Woedend! projects were advergames for clients such as 7UP, ASICS and Voetbal International, which if you are in Holland you might see show up on the interweb soon.

In between leaving Woedend! and joining NCsoft I also did some brief consulting at Avaloop in Vienna. They are working on a rather interesting “lifestyle” oriented MMO called Papermint.

But, like I said, I’ll be in Brighton now. And Brighton is awesome. Did you know that Brighton will soon be home to the world’s largest inland giant squid processing facility? It will be connected to the sea through an old underground tunnel that’s been unused for centuries. At least, that’s what it said on a city council construction notice somewhere in town, which is apparently it’s part of some kind of ARG, but I’m going to pretend it is true.

Or so says Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. So I guess that’s it for Guitar Hero as we know it, and that might not be a good thing. Is it possible to make a Guitar Hero style game featuring additional peripherals? Sure, why not. (Rock Band says hi.) But when the CEO says Guitar Hero isn’t just about guitars, that franchise is clearly stepping into a minefield of potential failure. Something about that quote just really makes me laugh.

A friend of mine once told me the design document of one of the modern adventure-style Sonic games started with the words “Sonic is not just about running really fast”. Maybe that’s why those games ended up so mediocre. I guess once a company wants a franchise to be something it’s not, they have to be really lucky not to screw it up.

Activision’s handling of the Guitar Hero franchise is generally quite puzzling. By carefully managing the brand they could have had a guaranteed best-seller every two years forever, but instead they chose to strip mine the brand in just a short few years. I’m not a sales expert but I’d be surprised if the franchise doesn’t start seeing some diminishing returns. Activision then has the choice of either drilling the franchise further into the ground with even more sequels, or to let it cool off for multiple years while Harmonix continues to release games at a more reasonable pace. Both scenarios don’t seem particularly advantageous to Activision.

As a side note, it’s interesting to see how Activision became “the new EA” just in time to become the actual new EA.

Wikis are commonly used in game design, as it makes the documentation easier to use and share, and easier to break down into smaller more manageable chunks. But one of the things that wiki software sadly doesn’t do well are graphs and tables.

Perhaps some wiki software exists that handles tables properly, but MediaWiki definitely doesn’t, which is very annoying as it’s the most commonly used wiki software (it’s the one based on Wikipedia). To make a table you have to edit the page source and use all sorts of weird bracket combinations to indicate rows and columns. That means it will take just a few minutes before you’ll want to staple your face.

I don’t know why I didn’t come up with this before, but here’s a PRO TIP! that I got from another game designer last week. It’s so good you might want to sit down for this. Okay, are you ready? Here’s what you do: 1) create a spreadsheet in Google Documents and 2) use the embed code to integrate it into the wiki page. Whoa! You can even generate graphs based on your data and drop them into the wiki knowing that they’ll always be up-to-date.

And the world is a better place.

It’s totally disappointing though. There isn’t even a cut scene.

Remember when you were a kid and your parents went to IKEA and they put you in the ball pool and then you were like “oh man, there’s a million colored balls! And I can swim in them! Wheeeeeeee!”. Personally I don’t remember that at all, because I have never in my life been in a ball pool. But I imagine the experience to be similar to being at GDC, where you can marvel at amazing indie games and roll around in them all starry-eyed. By which I mean, roll around in them mentally. With your mind.

Sorry, that was really the best intro I could come up with. This is what happens when you don’t post for several months.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’re still somehow jaded about gaming, even after the spectacular video games parade that was the year 2007, then the indie games shown at GDC will definitely cheer you up. (A special shout-out goes to Toblix, the resident grumpy man of the Idle Thumbs forums. This post is for you!)

So let me tell you about those games. For a look at some brand new gameplay ideas, you can always rely on the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. Katamari Damacy was famously first presented there in prototype form in 2004, as well as several other games that have since risen to indie stardom. The Experimental Gameplay Sessions again delivered a fantastic aggregation of innovative games this year.

You owe it to yourself to check out all of the featured games. Play them. Really do. Of course, some of them are a bit rough around the edges, but they are all driven by interesting ideas.

It’s great how all these games lovingly embrace the abstract possibilities of gaming. What if you play an invisible monster that you literally cannot see? What if you could co-op with yourself from the past? What if the world was black and white and you had to constantly shift color in order to get anywhere? (Dude, I think about that all the time.)

You might actually know some of these games already. It’s striking how many of them were made in Flash, and indeed some of them have already been viral intercloud sensations. It wouldn’t be surprising if expanded versions of some of them show up on XBLA, WiiWare, PSN, Steam or elsewhere. If I’m not mistaken, the excellent Crayon Physics Deluxe is already being ported to Nintendo DS, which is clearly the right platform for a game that involves drawing. 

Some of these games — particularly the ones involving time-manipulation or playing two levels at once — can quite boggle the mind. But once you start playing, you will quickly and intuitively understand the rules of the game world, and they turn out to be a lot more manageable than you expected. If you’ve played Portal you are quite familiar with how that goes.

Shadow by Alex Austin (Gish co-creator) had the most impressive gameplay mechanics shown at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, at least to my mind. It’s not yet available for public consumption, as it’s really just a very early prototype, but maybe its ideas will be further fleshed out in a full game someday. In Shadow, you have to navigate your way to seemingly unreachable areas in a 3D environment by occasionally shifting to a 2D environment that consists of the shadows cast by all the objects. That makes it possible to, for instance, hop from the shadow of a block that is cast on the floor onto the shadow on the same floor of a block high in the sky, then shift back to 3D, et voila; you are on top of the unreachable block in the sky. It’s like Crush on crack. 

Then there’s of course the Independent Games Festival and awards, which had a phenomenal line-up this year.

Audiosurf gives you a whole new way to experience the music that’s on your harddrive. Fret Nice uses the Guitar Hero controller in a platformer. Fez puts its own unique spin on the 3D/2D shifting mechanic from Crush and Super Paper Mario, and also looks delicious. Crayon Physics Deluxe will make you smile. Ookibloks will also make you smile (hooray for dynamic music). On the other hand, experimental horror-adventure The Path will probably creep you out a little, although that depends on the decisions you make. And take a look at Flipside. That’s made with the Source engine. Yeah.

Let’s also not forget World of Goo, which grabbed the Design Innovation Award this year. It takes the basic gameplay of Tower of Goo and expands on it in really cool ways.

Which reminds me: Kyle Gabler, the designer of World of Goo, gave a rather insightful and entertaining presentation called “A Tale of Two Kyles” at the Indie Games Summit together with Kyle Gray. Both Kyles worked at EA for some time until they got bored with sequels and license-based games. Both took very different approaches to getting their own projects started. While Gabler decided to fly out on his own to make Tower of Goo, Gray decided to work from within the belly of the corporate beast. He somehow convinced EA to give him a small budget to make a small game, which eventually evolved into an unannounced Nintendo DS title.

Gray showed some prototypes of the game, which involved a Brittish explorer platforming his way through the jungle, killing monkeys, and occasionally transforming into a Mecha Big Ben with mechanical arms and lasers.

Oh man. I… I think I have something in my eye. 

You know what? Games are awesome. Like I’ve said before, it feels like the industry has entered a (mini?) golden age, and for a large part the super-talented men and women from the indie scene are to thank for it.

At the Game Designers Rant, Jane McGonigal held an inspiring rant about the need for game designers to approach real-life experiences with a game design mindset. The real world, she argued, is often boring and/or broken, and there’s a lot that game designers can do to make people more engaged and happy in everyday life.

The broader developer community is probably not that eager to think about such issues yet. Aren’t we still trying to figure out how to make good video games? But as gaming continues on its course of becoming a prominent (perhaps dominant?) means of engagement in the 21st century, I think Jane McGonigal’s message will make more and more sense. See: notes and slides on Jane’s blog, and TerraNova’s transcript.

Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility.

Jane offered examples of real-life experiences that could benefit from game design, such as running, being on a plane, playing fetch with your dog or commuting. “Why don’t I level up when I go running? Make a Nike iPod MMO!”.

It’s probably no coincidence that Jane mentioned playing fetch with your dog as an activity that game designers could make more interesting. This year’s Game Design Challenge was to come up with an inter-species game, and contestant Brenda Brathwaite suggested an idea for an ARG that could be played by dog owners together with their dogs. Instead of just taking your dog for a walk, you would also be participating in an elaborate community-driven real-life game. Woof.

Applied game design soon emerged as a recurring theme for me at the conference. At a Dutch game developers gathering I had a nice chat with the course leader of the HKU (where I got my master’s degree a few years ago), who is trying to apply game design theory to musea and libraries. Libraries in particular are becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s society, but what if you were to look at it from an interactivity/gameplay/community point of view? Could game design make libraries more relevant and less, well, boring? I don’t really know, but it’s fun to think about.

Gabe Zichermann’s talk at the Worlds in Motion Summit also dealt with “the use of gaming design in non-gaming contexts”, though he focused on the web instead of real-life. After pointing out different game-like elements in eBay and Facebook, he argued that game design could “fix” various experiences on the web, including shopping, travel, financial services, and so on. “There’s no upper limit. Everything can be made more fun.”

It’s true that even the simplest game elements can add value to certain websites. The progress bar on LinkedIn immediately comes to mind. It makes it more fun to fill out your profile, invite contacts and gather testimonials. There are no rewards whatsoever for filling that progress bar, yet it somehow compells you to ‘play’ the social networking game.

The notion of applied game design was not without some criticism, however. Going back to Jane’s rant, Jonathan Blow offered a response in which he pointed to a game-like system in real-life that did not increase his happiness. He talked about Air Miles and other airline reward programs, which give you points for flying with a certain airline. This unnecessarily complicates things, Jon argued, and probably even increases the average price of tickets. Jane responded that the intentions behind this system (as a marketing device) were different, and that her rant was about game designers approaching mundane everyday activities from a game design perspective.

It’s definitely interesting to think about game design in a real-world context. In what unexpected places could we see game design making a difference in the coming years?