QOTD: The Realm of Play

Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play. 

Eric Hoffer 

Permanent Character Death

DOFUS Heroic Server introduces permanent character death in a MMORG.

Wakka wakka wakka

My social research methods course is all but complete, the other producers are back from mat leave and vacation, and my home reno is a whisper away from done – it’s blog o’clock!

I’ve been playing some Pacman in a Flash app while on the train on this old laptop I use to turn my commute into some of the best times I have in a day. As a child I spent days playing this from a cartridge on the Atari 800 and, while I’ve known that Flash and other emulated versions of the yellow uber-consumer have been around for a while, I never sought them out. But now, the Pac is back and I’ve been having a blast.

There is a real beauty in its components, so simple that you can pretty much list them off the top of your head:

• 2D maze of primary blue
• One bright yellow avatar consisting of one character affordance – a giant mouth
• The single joystick interface (in its Flash incarnation, arrow keys)
• Two rates of motion – normal and eating (impeded)
• Four directions of motion and that only rarely due to the maze constraints
• Four antagonists with rudimentary AI, mostly just patrol paths
• Four “power pellets” that reverse the roles of protagonist and antagonist for a few seconds
• Ghost Pen from which antagonists spawn.
• Pacing – with every level cleared, movement is faster, power pellets work for less time, and the value of bonus fruits increases
• Primary objective – eat all the dots (10 points each)
• Other objectives – eat all bonus fruits (increasing); eat all ghosts (first ghost 200, doubling for each subsequent to a maximum of four)
• Great audio – wakka wakka wakka wakka bloook! bloook! blooook! Wawawawawwawawablooooop!

I love it. Such immediacy of connection – hugely immersive and engaging. Emergent behaviours and gameplay. Getting a sense for ghost motion, devising your own strategies to support taking objectives. Shifting priorities - while eating the ghosts is the big point-maker in the early game, this diminishes against the rising value of fruit and decreasing power-pellet effectiveness.Creating your own games – do I play for points? Level-clearing? Revenge? The Triple Crown? Taking shots of Crown Royal?

I really miss the joystick - there was an amazing tactile immersion with that interface. And, in the Flash version, the aspect ratio reflects the arcade game rather than the TV-configured version I had when I was ten so my old patterns are useless. But fumbling through it, getting the rhythms, it’s new and nostalgic at the same time.

When Namco makes gathering games, they make gold. Now I want to play Katamari Damacy again. Naaa nana na nana na na na na na nana na…

The Recidivist

A few months ago, Penny Arcade ran a comic called The Recidivist. I’m hoping I have it more under control. Fortunately, my daughter is more fun than any game, ever, so I’m not that worried. That said…

I’ve been back in WoW for the last week or so. There are a few reasons – firstly, the guild is great and, even when not playing, I check the guild forums every day. Secondly, our daughter is sleeping more reliably so Cait and I have a chance to log together and we’re pushing her main to 70. Thirdly, there is a social science conference being held on the Earthen Ring server in May that I wish to attend so I’m getting a toon leveled to 19 for that. Finally, I joined an ad hoc with the Terrors to Karazhan last Friday and it was a blast. I can’t wait to go again, but there is a yawning chasm of understanding between me and a reasonable performance in the dungeon.

The raiding members of the guild have a huge and expert knowledge, a body of practice specific to Kara, situated within an expert knowledge of the end game itself (armor, weapons, upgrades, skills, strategies, play-styles). I have so much going on right now I doubt that I can dedicate the time to closing that knowledge gap through research but I would hate to just sponge the information without doing any background reading.

I suppose I should just ask.

Late Fragment

A couple weekends ago I had the opportunity to experience the interactive movie Late Fragment. It is the child of a partnership between the CFC Media Lab and the National Film Board, with Ana Serrano and Anita Lee producing. The piece follows the stories of three individuals taking part in the Restorative Justice Project – a rehabilitative program that invites the perpetrators and victims of crimes to talk, share, and “look for wholeness, balance, forgiveness, safety”. Each story was told by a writer-director team and follows Theo, Faye and Kevin as they recount and revisit their personal tragedies.

It was interesting to finally have some time to sit with the finished work as I was quite involved at one-remove from the making of it. My wife was on the production team and many of the people who worked so hard on it for so long I have the great fortune to call my friends.

It was quite the journey – ambitious and important and flawed. As a work of Canadian interactive art it is groundbreaking, building alliances and experience and tools for the community to build on. In that regard, it is a tremendous success and goes a considerable way to addressing the “provincial backwater” approach that we as a nation take in this industry. As interactive media creators, Canada is stricken with a conservative vision, suspicious money, and inexperienced production and management talent who trickle away to more capably ambitious climes the moment they learn the important lessons of the media but before they have achieved something great. Now that I’ve gone through Late Fragment, I am worried that many of my friends may before long be wooed away.

A considerable effort went in to tracking and interweaving the story lines. Tools needed to be created to allow the team to visualize and enable audience movement through the madly branching script. There are some great photos out there of the early days of development where a riot of coloured papers line the walls of a room, a thread-and-thumbtack spiderweb describing the different kinds of moment and destinations. (Please read the Making of Late Fragment).

On the whole Late Fragment tried to do a few too many things starting with so many unanswered questions about how to do any of it. That they answered as many as they did is testament to their talent. Cinematically it is great, with lovely performances and undertold, well-paced stories that work well the non-linear architecture. The emplottment of Theo’s story is especially interesting, possible to completely misread if not explored, and is a particularly good use of this medium.

One barrier to fully exploring it was “pain”. Late Fragment is not fun. The stories are not light. They are very human and touching and beautifully realized but they are painful, the lives of these individuals fundamentally traumatized. It is a lot of emotional work to keep asking and wanting to understand, moving through and back again until you understand – it’s a hard place to spend several hours, or to desire to revisit. An adventure or rom-com would lighten the burden on the user, something to consider when gaining literacy in the medium has already been added to the cognitive load of the audience.

The project brought together three writers and three directors in a common structure. I believe this was less successful than it could have been. Unless you are making a collection of short films, it is more interesting to interweave narratives and it really needs more commonality than “people telling their stories to each other”. If they don’t impact upon one another – and I don’t mean in “the audience can create meaning in their own juxtapositions” sense – it creates noise in the experience of any single narrative. This could be made to work if there was a game in it, some configurative/interpretive puzzle the audience can work away on when they are washing dishes or commuting, something to draw them back to the experience to test their theory. Then it would become a narrative-media Rubik’s Cube, with something more revealed in the unlocking. Without wanting to spoil the experience, I believe Theo’s Story accomplished this within its own structure. I think the experience would be more satisfying overall if there was some element like this being attempted across the stories as well.

I found motivation a challenge. Mixing the conventions of linear cinema with the user agency of interactive media creates conflict. How do you rework the conventions of cinema with its editing techniques of non-chronological, dramatically-ordered emplottment and preserve narrative tension in a story? LF played with it to varying degrees of success but the fundamental problem remains and is a constant question of this format. If you strip out directed plot you have a linear account, or a user-driven emplottment. Presumably the screenwriter, director, and editor of a cinematic work – with their skills, experience and familiarity with the material – have selected the most dramatically satisfying route to experience the plot points. Why would the user want to navigate unless they can take their own route, ask their own questions?

The navigation fights this agency. Delivered on a DVD player, the user has the single interaction of press the “enter” button to “learn more”. This doesn’t begin to set up expectations of what you will actually get by clicking so you create your own reasons and – if the response doesn’t meet the expectation you created – you are disappointed. You have also left a scene you were interested in – one you wanted to learn more about – with no reliable way to get back to it. This makes it hard to build trust between the audience and the director. You need trust for the user to feel confident about interacting otherwise the tendency is for the audience to revert to the cinematic position of surrendering authorship to the director and only interact when the movie forces it by looping.

One of the successful implementations of the interaction results from the complexity of the work. The story gaps and the distraction introduced by cutting between narrative lines is disorienting. This disorientation continually invites the question “where are we?” and when I click to learn more and receive usefully orienting information and then click and am returned to the scene I left, my expectations were well met. I was pleased and surprised at how effective this simple action was.

If I had to build on their considerable base, I think I would try telling a single story, multiple points of view around a caper. Maybe more blending with interactive media – work in some other non-cinematic approaches to the material. This could be something as simple as geographically or temporally organized chapter menus – context cues that borrow some of the understandings of narrative arrangement in video games. But there are other options as well. I agree with their decision to not build the experience on a GUI that provides a range of explicit choices but the use of some clues that help me frame my expectations would help build trust and raise enjoyment. Perhaps use colour or composition within the shot, or editing conventions that hint more expressly at the response audience action will cause would work. To encourage interacting without raising the fear that you won’t get to finish the scene could perhaps be facilitated with a back-button that functions with a “cut-back” cinematic feel. With the greater prevalence of DVD-enabled game consoles perhaps there exists other platform opportunities than the traditional DVD player that would untangle some of the challenges of connecting agency, expectation and outcome.

And those are my fragments of Late Fragments. I’m still thinking of it many days later in an age of disposable media experiences and I want to congratulate everyone involved. There’s something compelling in there and they went searching for it. I hope they do it again.

GoCrossCampus

GoCrossCampus (GXC) is a massively multiplayer online turn based strategy game from some students at the MIT brain trust. It lives in that space between board games like Risk, Eric Zimmerman/Word's Sissy Fight 2000, and Facebook – an admittedly strange blend. I've been expecting something like this for a little while now but am delighted by the charming approach taken.

The creators are now taking seed money from some VC groups and looking to bring the game to the workplace as a team building activity. I love it.

(Cross-posted to Brand Culturist)

Back to the grindstone

I wrote last on how grinding had been used in Overlord as a forgiving mechanic that penalized poor performance while creating a diegetically plausible vector for the player to get back in the game. I found it well implemented. I don’t usually find it done so, and MMOGs I find particularly bad for this.

Liz Lawley has written on the pleasures of grinding and I, too, use it this way. I even weed my lawn as she described – crawling on hands-and-knees, tugging root structures from the soil – with the same satisfaction described. In spring, I attack snow banks in the same way with the same pleasure. Ask me how I spent my weekend, trusty ice-scraper in hand, laying waste to the… ANYWAY, YES, I’m a GRINDER. And I grind in games for mindless pleasure.

My problem is that I have found the MMOGs I have played to be largely an exercise in grinding (I’m aware of what this perhaps says about my relative ability at playing them). Both in WoW and CoX, grinding occurred as solo- and group-play activities. I would solo grind if I just wanted to play a little and didn’t want to go through the effort of partying up for quests, or grind while I was waiting for a party to form/arrive, or while in queue for a respawn (don’t get me started on this). As I recall, I also spent a fair amount of time in Feralas grinding for some ultra-rare drop to make my [Robe of the Void] – an item I desired because I was predominantly a solo player and wasn’t going to get into guild-play enough to raid, nor PvP enough to qualify for that gear. Grinding leading to more grinding.

Sometimes group play turned into a goal-less activity wreaking a path of destruction that, while profitable, quickly ceased to be fun. I believe this was caused by a collapse of group purpose. With all nearby quests completed, no new goal established, no group cohesion beyond immediate questing, and no normative behaviours for establishing new goals, the party carried on with inertia but no object. There seemed to be a hesitancy on the part of party members - myself included - to strongly put forth new direction, a behaviour that I think would have been welcomed from the party leader if only so members could make a clear decision regarding whether they would remain partied for that or not. After a time, one member would say “I have to log” and the party would dissolve moments later.

That play can become grinding would not be such a problem if the combat itself didn’t feel so much like button pressing and timer-minding. I have no affection at all for jRPGs like Final Fantasy and their administrative play. What I find, though, is that western-RPG-style MMOGs seem to be built that way, too. I suppose there is an optimal way to handle every situation and, were I more spreadsheet-oriented, I could tweak my play to use every one of my character’s more obscure abilities to hone my play for every situation. But I’m not, and tend to find that I use the same two or three abilities in the same order with the same timing for almost every combat situation. And the only action really available in those worlds is combat, so the game quickly becomes an assembly line with a weak narrative; a treadmill. Play only really shines during group play when too much is going on for things to be rote, when people really hold their party roles and keep things from tilting over to disaster against all odds. At those moments it’s a furiously paced team sport tied to a loot table set inside a social spectacle. Without that team action, it’s bouncing a ball against a wall tied to a loot table, etc. Despite the storylines, and quests and conventions, I really can’t take it at all seriously as narrative gaming.

Don't let the bastards grind you down

Back into Overlord for a bit and it turns out that a part of this solo-play game is grinding. The Overlord collects life force from killed creatures – soulfully glowing balls of soul – to summon minions. Your minions will kill something, sheep perhaps, corpses scattered like a butcher shop explosion in the “The Pastoral Symphony” from Fantasia. “For the masssssterr!” crow the little gremlins as they gather the orbs and hold them high over their misshapen heads in offering to you.

Have I mentioned there are parts of the game I really like?

Now, each one of these orbs lets you summon a minion up to the maximum number your skill allows. They die, you can pull new recruits through the portals so long as you have life force of the right type (some game mechanic masking as an elementalism-of-evil). Usually you gather enough life force as you proceed through the quests that you should always have enough. However, if you really bone a quest and lose too many of your imps you may need to go harvest souls.

I tend to think of grinding as an aberration-to-ideal that occurs where game mechanics intersect the realities of production. To keep a player in that oh-so-desirous flow-state, designers have to build into the game measures that adjust the difficulty to the player's skill. The goal for designers is to keep gameplay in “the zone” – that sweet spot where the game is challenging enough to be engaging while not exceeding the player’s ability to the extent that play is frustrating.

Character death ejects the player from the game, breaking the flow state, which isn’t necessarily undesirable – it depends on the type of gameplay you are trying to create and what the win state is relative to. Casual games do it all the time and the potential of losing is one of the things that makes winning pleasurable. However, in narrative games the objectives of play may be different and dying is usually a forcible ejection from the story. This can be distinctly unpleasant and destructive of the pleasure taken from the media, like having someone knock the novel from your hand or block your view of the movie screen. Narrativus interruptus.

There are other factors to consider. Skipping to the points, designers of narrative games are trying to make them:

1. easy enough to be playable
2. hard enough to be challenging
   
3. have negative outcomes for failed performance that are diegetically consistent and so do not eject the player from the story
4. fun for a broad range of player skill, experience, style, and objectives (especially important as games become high-budget, mass-market consumer commodities)
5. profitable

That fifth one is the clincher. Even if the first four are achievable, it has to be a sufficiently profitable venture to the studio to not just address but balance all those needs. In solo play games it isn't so bad; you just allow for difficulty to be adjusted and – tada – no flow problems. This can either be a manual switch or something more sophisticated that gauges how well you seem to be doing and makes adjustments automatically.

In multiplayer environments this isn’t as feasible. The game needs to equitably treat players but, as Raph Koster has pointed out in A Game Without Treadmills, “the average user is below average” and a few players will come to dominate the game.

So that’s where grinding comes in.

Grinding allows designers to build games that serve the needs of skilled, experienced gamers while dumbing it down for the rest of us at a cost to them that leaves some profit in it for the company.

Let’s be clear – grinding is not the same as practice. When a player practices, they increase their skill at an action. You don’t grind in Quake: Arena. You either make the shot or you don’t. If you’re not skilled enough to play with the big kids and that bugs you, practice until you're a gunslinger or don’t play with them. Simple. That, or you don’t play with anyone, commit to single-player and set the AI to “mouth breather”.

In narrative games the player is usually connected to the game world through a character that is read with a narrative filter by the game. That is, the game understands the player as a character in the story who is growing in skill even if the player is not, or not at the same rate as the character relative to the world. As a guide to recognizing these kinds of worlds: it is probably a MMORPG, there are character levels/experience points/skill points, and POV is probably third person.

A gamer that has the skill to play the game well should experience the smoothest flow through the content. A player a little short on skill can appreciate design that allows them to recover and continue playing without experiencing the full cost of play failure until they gain in skill (or don’t, and they just factor it in as part of the gameplay). It lets them stay in flow longer. A very poor player may be ejected from the story as the tale becomes one, not of questing, but of failing quests and farming for the ability to attempt and fail again. Either this player will leave the game or will ploddingly grind their way to the highest levels.

So back to my experience with the grinding in Overlord; I boned a quest and was down to my last few life force for summoning “reds” (ranged DPS-type minions, immune to fire). Not knowing if reds would be valuable in the next quest or if there were a source of red life force there, I didn’t feel comfortable starting the next quest without replenishing my stock – I needed to go grind for more. And the grind mechanic – used here – was forgiving. I could do that; it was a fair price for my shoddy performance on the aforementioned boned-quest. Oddly, though, it also helped to ground me in the game world. “I know where I can get those,” I thought to myself, remembering the area where the firebeetles lived. It wasn’t far away and I knew how to get there. This knowledge was strangely comforting to me in this world where I struggled to get my bearings. Perhaps the source of my jolt of pleasure was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome but, regardless, it was an example of the successful use of a too-often-poorly used mechanic as a novel technique to correct for player skill level, and in a place I didn’t expect to find it.

Steps to Being a Better Evil Overlord

I loved Dungeon Keeper 2 both for the play and the theme and am constantly on the lookout for games like it. I've been starry-eyed for Molyneux's approach to games since his early Bullfrog days and comedic "evil empires" with hordes of gibbering minions just appeal to me. So when Overlord was released and well-reviewed by Tycho, I put it on my list of "must plays", quietly watched as the price fell at the Game Shack and lay in wait for an opportunity to play. For the last couple years I have been spending my gaming time in persistent online worlds but I am increasingly disappointed with the play pacing of MMOGs. And my ten week old baby girl is unpredictable in her evening sleeping and insistent when needing attention. As a result my gaming in past weeks has become almost exclusively solo and - crucially - pausable.

But I have a new gaming box, and I delivered a contract yesterday and that sounded like opportunity knocking. I picked myself up a copy of Overlord and went in for a look around.

First impressions - it's beautiful to look at and feels like the lovechild of Dungeon Keeper and Fable, which appeals to my inner-Molyneux fanboy. The tutorial was charming, the voice-acting and NPC performances were engaging, and I actually laughed aloud at some of the lines. Writing MATTERS - spend the damn money. It had a nicely cinematic-feeling for a lesson and raised the pulse for the experience potential. An added notable is the sweep-gestures to direct minion pathfinding. Well conceived and executed, it is nicely satisfying and provides a great, mastermind sense of “action-by-ravaging-proxies”. Smoov moves, gj.

My largest complaint with the opening was that they used too much cut-scene for exposition and teaching – tragically like Fable, in this regard. In their defense, the cut scenes tended to be short, seamless, and well executed, my character did not act without my input, and the scenes were - on the whole, enjoyable. It's still an annoying legacy convention and I find it disruptive to immersing in the world. Wresting control from the user is a lazy way of constraining action to ensure the player is paying attention. I wish designers would opt for greater appeal to visual desire, diegetic constraint, architecture, staging, and blocking to focus player attention at necessary moments and avoid taking agency from the user. This isn't Pac-Man – it looks and sounds like the real world and you create expectations with that. You can't just put up a wall and say "can't even try to climb it" and expect that players won't be frustrated by the dissonance and arbitrariness.

As a rule I never read anything about navigating or operating in a game before playing. If it is well designed, it will leverage convention, device, character affordances, context constraints, and the action-response cycle to smoothly grow the player's immersion in the character's abilities and agency in the world. Mouse control of camera/character direction combined with WASD movement is a well accepted convention. Why the developers chose to have "S" make the avatar turn to face the 3rd-person camera rather than back up is baffling.

Virtual worlds lack a huge amount of orientation information – unique details, sounds, smells, textures, wind – so unless your world is simple and obvious in its ability to orient players, PROVIDE A MAP AND FACING/COMPASS. And I don't mean a paper-copy of a map in the disk case - that's just spiteful. Overlord tries to keep the amount of GUI apparatus to a minimum and so tried to get away with just this very thing. And, with a seeming gleeful malice, one of the quests is described as being "to the east". There are no signs, no compass, no map. I wandered around town trying to get a sense of "this way to quest". Every time I passed the quest-giving NPC he volunteered the information that it was "...to the east".

I was shouting at the monitor.

While the minions are a smooth wave of destruction flitting about the battlefield at my gesture, my own character handles like a cow in combat. Non-standard strafe and reverse, and no jump makes him feel a lumbering oaf. Mana doesn't regenerate except with potions so I either use spells not at all, or blow through them in seconds. I keep my overlord way in the rear.

Targeting in combat is great – unless there are people you wish to leave alive. It is maddeningly difficult to not kill the pedestrians. Fine, perhaps that's a point but I feel like I should be able to set rules for my minions like "DON'T KILL THAT GUY I WANT TO ROAST HIM SLOWLY OVER DAYS". Or perhaps even let him live. Call it a whim – capriciousness is one of the perks to being a villain. It could be that I simply need to practice so that I am more adept with the controls. Now that I think of it, perhaps "sweeping" rather than using targeted combat is a better control action. I'll leave who to kill to the discretion of my ravening horde rather than trust my own (in)ability to target my enemies. Something to try.

The combination of orientation challenges and lack of quest location benchmarking had me wandering around quite a bit more than I wanted to. While I hiked around, I noted that mobs respawn slowly in areas already cleared but, inexplicably, stacks of dirty dishes, clay urns, baskets, and chests reset as soon as you leave and return to an area. If you get a “load” screen, they’re back. The halls still smoked with the ruin of our last sacking, but the stacks of plates were back. Circling in search of my quest the breakables began to mock me with their persistence. Stacks of plates, tedium and increasing frustration – it felt like washing up after Christmas dinner. Sure, I made a lot of gold from looting but that just made it feel like grinding and that should never happen in a single-player game.

Rebuilding the tower is a great visual of your returning power and influence and provides ample quest hooks. Construction teams clearing debris from doorways with resulting increased access to the tower and the abilities those rooms offer is a great example of a natural diegetic constraint tied to a reward for success. Nice.

Final first impressions? WHY CAN'T I SIT IN MY BROKEN THRONE AND BROOD? WHY CAN'T I LAUGH MANIACIALLY? That's the reason for being an evil overlord. I mean, really, without that, what's the point? Also… I want to play again. Now.

Last issue

City of Heroes/Villains: I want to love it - I really do. And there are parts of it that are incredible (i'm looking at you, character creator). But I haven't time to really commit to it, and the world isn't wooing me to new activities like PvP or inventions, the combat is power-timer administration, the economy feels pasted on, and the Super Groups are too disconnected from the world to make getting involved in one mandatory. I'm sure it would improve my understanding of the game nuances but the overall balance, integration, and transformative payoff isn't there so I don't find it an enticing goal.

I really want a super hero MMOG to make the player-character identification compelling and the gameplay tight, exciting, and fun. I hold on to my hopes for Champions Online.

Remember the Alamo

With the baby, work, and my poking around CoX, I haven't logged in to TrN much lately and so missed that Alamojack - James Rhoads - had retired. A great tank by all accounts, he was one of the most enjoyable reasons to log. Funny, funny man. Go easy, JBR. You'll be missed.

CIty of Heroes

My latest play time has been spent in NCSoft's City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoX). Developer Cryptic Studios is back in the lab working on a next gen super hero MMOG, Champions Online. As I just upgraded my hardware to the point that it can run CoX, I've been poking around the Islands for the last few days to see the studios past work (Freedom server).

The game allows you to create a superhero or villain and enter a comicbook world where you fight thugs, foil crime and battle villains – or do the exact opposite. While there are 11 servers available for North Americans, only Freedom and Virtue appear to have any real population. According to the Dec/07 NCsoft annual report, total membership for CoX sits around 136,000 (thanks, wikipedia). It's no WoW, but it's far from lonely. The game also has a reputation as being the most queer-positive MMOG with a community relations group that actively seeks queer-outreach opportunities and hosted a Rainbow Prom event that was so well attended it took down the server, which is awesome.

The character creation process is extremely satisfying for any superhero fantasies - probably the coolest that I've seen in any game to date. Dangerously seductive. I keep rolling new characters just to see what it can do. I’ll finish a character and not even bother trying to name them or log. I know their name, whether it is available on the server or not.

Combat is in the WoW style, as are team roles (tank, healer, dps). Environments are a bit plain, but character, costume and power animations are very pretty. And using gravity power to throw a streetlight at someone is fantastic.

Low level missions are for the most part instanced and lack some polish. I found them a little boring and repetitive - especially the maps - with a lot of jogging and random encounters en route, However, you can make things more interesting by changing your personal mission difficulty, bumping it up to one of five available levels. Sweat more and you don’t notice the landscape as much. Mission instances also scale in response to the number of team members (up to seven). If someone leaves the mission, exiting the instance and re-entering resets the difficulty without reseting the instance mobs. There are raids and PvP zones, but I haven't been round to visit them yet.

There are also some interesting intersections between character experience and social mechanics, most notably the "sidekick/exemplar" (lackey/malefactor for villains) system which permits higher level characters to enter into a relationship with noobs that enables the lowbie to fight at one-level under the veteran, or nerf the vet to one-level above, making it possible for friends at different levels to team up and keep the difficulty level appropriate. This is a stroke of genius and should probably be a standard feature of all theme-park style MMOGs.

In addition, toon defeat in CoX combat for characters level 10 or higher results in an XP debt that means your next earned XP is split 50:50 between leveling and paying back the debt, which is a decent gameplay failure penalty. Debt gets burned faster by picking up a sidekick, encouraging veterans to bring lowbies into teams, and encourages knowledge transfer. Granted, it’s the people that are dying that are so encouraged rather than the ones that survive but noobs can’t be choosers.

Super Groups are the equivalent of guilds and allow a membership of 75. Team colours can be chosen and an SG version of your toon's costume can be defined that you can toggle into. This makes for really visible social cohesion, and some great team photos.

Player presence in-game is made more real with customizable SG headquarters. HQs can be decorated, expanded, and enhanced with tools that improve abilities. Sadly, they are instanced rather than actually being part of the geography which would be very exciting (store-fronts in mini-malls become gleaming fortresses in the sky or what-not). Invites to SGs are a common spam.

I haven’t spoken about the economy here because I don’t have a great grasp on “inventions” and “salvage” yet, but when I do, I’ll distinguish that that from the inspirations, enhancements and reputation (read “potions, magic items" and – oddly – "currency”).

For all its successes, the starkness and inaccessibility of the world I find a significant challenge to immersion. Everything is coldly rectilinear, pedestrians and mobs robotic, and the environment is utterly unresponsive to player action. This is standard in MMOGs, but it struck me more acutely in CoX because the game sometimes nods towards the environment being in play. For instance, using my streetlight tossing example from above, I can make the throw, but I can’t tear the lamp posts from the sidewalk. Instead, my powers open a dimensional portal which draws one of a random number of objects through it – desks, streetlights, and something that may be a cubical divider – and that gets thrown at the target. So you have your classic battle-in-the-streets between heroes and villains and you hurl a streetlight at your enemy. The physics and animation of the throw are great. The satisfaction of raising your hands and lifting something huge and mundane and flinging it in combat is so reminiscent of comics that you immediately feel yourself sliding into that world. And then you throw a desk. Why? And then a cubical divider. Where did that come from? Then another desk! If projectiles don’t have to make some environmental sense why can’t I throw a tiger, or an iron maiden, a speedboat? How does someone with gravity control open a dimensional portal, anyway? And what dimension has only streetlamps, desks, and cubical dividers? It explodes the immersive success and is a train wreck for the glimmering hope of character transformation that was won with that first throw.

I can't really get a sense of the over-arching narrative yet – I’ve read that there is one – but I doubt it is essential to the enjoyment. Also lacking have been any highly-public displays of role-playing. The dearth of these things I feel stems from that inability for players to really impact the world. The classic motivator for super-villains is world domination and that is impossible by design. From there, the opportunities for real villainy or heroism roll backwards until you find yourself with muscles bulging in super-saturated tights breezing past the muggings of little-old ladies because they aren’t worth any XP in your level grind.

I'm enjoying my time in the land of tights-and-capes and will be here for a while yet, and I have great hopes that Champions Online will be far better still.

Villains: The Raidiologist (Science Corruptor) or Bad Packet (Technology Mastermind), Hero: Housecalls (Science Controller) or Daughter Darkness (Magic Defender). LFT, PST.

Respawn

I've been away for a while. My daughter was born in early January and is the most incredibly beautiful child. All previously scheduled activities went on hold. However, I'm back at work and have been writing on my commutes so I will start posting again.

I moved my main to a new World of Warcraft server and began playing with the Terra Nova crowd in their guild. It is an amazing group of people and home of the best guild-channel chatter that I have ever seen. I wish I could be on more often and get appropriately geared for play with them on the weekly Kara runs. My push from level 61 to 70 is done and Hes is looking well appointed now but my WoW ennui has resumed. Pugging it is just slow going. Unless I get serious about regular guild raiding, I just don’t know how much more time I can spend there until they release the new expansion. I have a longer piece on why I feel WoW misses connecting with me in a strongly emotional way and will look at getting that posted soon.