General
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.“If you accept buggy games and shady PR, you get the games you deserve.”
I could probably replace a quarter of my posts with that. The message seems not to get through. Then again, it has not gotten through on non-game fronts for a few thousand years, so my hope is misplaced.
: Zubon
A lot of people could be the player’s advocate to the developers in MMOs. Forumites say a lot of things, but the focus is about as good as a room full of overtired, over-caffeinated toddlers. Bloggers write with better focus, but we are full of ourselves. Playtime and sales statistics have extreme focus, but they don’t tell the developers anything human. The best player advocates, I believe, are the often overlooked, often assaulted community managers.
Since yesterday’s post was inspired by Language Log, I thought I would cite them again on user interfaces.
Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure it out by trial and error. I simply offer this to you as proof number 37 (I have made mention of many such examples in the past: road sign psycholinguistics and so on) of my claim that human/machine interface design today is in a state of total freaking disaster.
He is talking about projectors, ovens, and clock radios, but the discussion is especially relevant to MMOs. We are used to having forty hotkeys along with five chat tabs and a heads-up display that looks like a flight simulator. We forget that this is potentially insane.
I could point out that designers should pay more attention to the interface, that a MMO without UI-mod ability is a broken MMO, or that developers should prepare to adapt mods into the official UI after the players find a way to compensate for designers’ failure to pay attention to the interface. Feel free to take that direction in the comments. Instead, I will just point to WoW, which has more or less followed that cycle but also has a pretty easy interface for new players. The flight simulator display is for the advanced raider who can use forty buttons without thinking about it. The starting UI is simple enough for granny to start beating up wolves and bunnies. If, you know, your grandmother thought it was all right to beat up puppies because some dwarf told her to.
: Zubon
Three people on that Language Log thread cited The Design of Everyday Things by David Norman. I have added that to my (very long) reading list.
Jick’s comment on yesterday’s post meshes well with recent discussion of fairness. Let me introduce you to the Ultimatum Game, a favorite of experimental economics. There is a pot of money; player one allocates it, as much as he likes for himself, the rest for player two; player two chooses to accept this (and they both take their money) or reject it (and both get nothing). That is it.
Simple economic rationality suggests that you take whatever is offered: free money. In practice, people will start turning down free money if it means the person making the offer gets a much larger piece of the pie, with most people bailing in the one-third to one-fifth range. In the vernacular, screw that jerk.
That would be my translation of Jick’s comment as well: screw that jerk who bid $1 over the other The Price is Right player. Just because the rules let you do something does not mean that it is fair. Of course, the English word fair is a horrible mess. English speakers mash a dozen concepts into the word and equivocate madly. Does fairness mean playing by the rules? An equal outcome? An outcome that satisfies the most people? An outcome that rewards people based on their inputs? If asked to pin down a definition, many people will pull another vague term like “equitable,” which has the same problem. Bart Wilson has been trying to work that out.
I am not criticizing Jick’s point. I do not agree with it, because I think competitors in a game environment should do anything within the rules to win, but it is a viable social norm. Are there conditions under which you should not really try to win? Let us explore a few variations on Ultimatum below the break.
If you have been hoping to get your hands on an invite to try out Raph Koster’s Metaplace, go now and enter MPWELCOME as your invite key. Failing that, I have 10 invites to give out so reply if you are interested and I’ll send them out (unless more than 10 request them in which case I will choose randomly).
– Ethic
Last night I bought World of Goo from Steam (it marches on). I had played the demo quite a while ago, and I really enjoyed it. Yet, I decided for some stupid reason to pass. Recently, in a stroke of [marketing] genius 2D Boy released the excellent soundtrack for free! I spent much of yesterday’s work listening to the soundtrack, and after listening to Red Carpet Extend-o-matic for the 100th time, I resolutely decided that I would buy the darn game as soon as I got home.
Guild Wars did a similar [marketing] thing with the Eye of the North Expansion when DirectSong released the soundtrack for sale nearly a month before the games release. I remember discussing what content we would get with the expansion based on the titles of the songs and how each song sounded. As if we weren’t all hyped enough with the imminent release we now had some “content.”
It’s a pretty simple concept. The content is already there for the game. Might as well double dip.Â
–Ravious
the cage of those meticulous ink strokes
On the way back from the conference, I caught the opening of The Price is Right on TV. If you have not seen the game show, the first game is “Guess how much this item is. Whoever is closest without going over advances. If everyone goes over, we do another round of guesses.” They showed a fancy table then asked the four contestants to guess. $2400, $2195, $1200… You, as a gamer, know that the proper answer for #4 is $1201 (or possibly $1). You know this without even knowing the item in question, because unless it is some fantastical table worth more than $2400, the largest ranges available are $1-$1199 and $1201-$2194, and you can get a do-over on $1-$1199. But no, he went with $1900, and the item was $1400.
If you ever wonder about the failure of strategic thinking in your pickup group, remember this man who chose a $295 range over a $994 range that included the $295 range. He had 699 options that were strictly better than the one he chose, in a competition for real money and items, and he went with $1900.
On an unrelated note, I also caught the tail-end of Rachel Ray’s program, which was right before. I never knew that there were commercials for K-Y jelly and cottage cheese. Not together.
: Zubon
One of the worst things about MMOs, in my humble opinion, is the requirement usually for a block of uninterrupted time to play. Uninterrupted is the key sticking point. The pregant wife needs laundry carried up the stairs, a new episode of Fraggle Rock needs to go in to the DVD player, the dog dares you not to take him out, the roommate burns popcorn in the microwave, or your significant other decides to talk to you about the day “right now.” All of these things are temporary. The game just needs a pause.
Lately, I have inordinately enjoyed Warriors End at Whirled. It is a flash game that plays like bilging in Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, except that instead of water levels going down, you have warriors on the top who are blasting each other. If you have played Corpsecraft, their headline game, you know the same mechanic. There are no graphics to speak of, although that could be awesome. My team is based around Rex, who has the Distracting Pants power. Without this game, I might have gone my entire life without thinking, “My pants are insufficiently distracting.” And what kind of life would that be?
A new grind: emotionally satisfying for a while, and available in very small doses. And I am a stellar bilger, so this is right up my alley.
Also, Whirled will apparently give me candy or something if you sign up from my link. Full disclosure. I have no idea what you can do with the points and coins, but I will learn someday. Like Kongregate, another site for little games with points and trophies attached.
: Zubon
Yeah, “Warriors End,” no apostrophe. Like Rainbows End.
(it’s coming for PC on Q1 2009, or if you have an Xbox you can get it now from XBLA)
You need to play Braid because it’s beautiful. I don’t mean just visually – and it is a visual treat. I mean the whole package. It’s just a precious, beautiful gaming experience as a whole. Easily one of the most emotionally/intellectually rewarding games I’ve played in years, and that’s not a qualifier I throw around lightly. In these times of formulas, repetition and franchises, to find a game that challenges and engages you not because of its difficulty, but conceptually as a whole is rare. And to find it in the shape of, basically, a 2D platformer is just a miracle of design.
But it’s there, and it’s beautiful. Everything, from watercolor painting visuals, to its amazing soundtrack, its clever design and superb writing combines to make something unique.
Yes, there is life and original thought in today’s gaming. You can get it from XBLA for (I believe) $15 which is a steal for the experience you receive in return. Or it’s coming for PC soon. Whatever your case, this is not something you wanna miss. It’s smarter, more beautiful, more engaging, more thought-provoking and better designed than many, many of the games out there which took an army of people to make.
P.S.: Yes, I got a 360 for xmas. Games I’ve been playing: Rock Band 2 (which is awesome), Kung Fu Panda (which I stole from the kids because it’s great), Lego Indiana Jones (which is nice to look at but horrible to play, just like every other Lego game), and I’ve been beating the everliving crap out of the Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo Remix (which I love and I don’t care what you think).