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.