Category: General

I was wrong. /ignore does work in Town of Salem. I expected a menu interface. I have no idea where that is documented, but it works. I don’t know if it works permanently for an account or just for the one game.

: Zubon

Call me if they finish porting this to the PC. What I saw made Arkham Origins look good. Oh hey:

Maybe it will be ready in the fall.

: Zubon

To return to not making your content fun, I believe MMO content should be designed on a scale. On one end you have rewards, and on the other end you have fun. The more fun said content, the less rewarding it should be, while the less fun something is, the more rewarding it needs to be to stay viable/relevant.
— SynCaine, Fun vs Reward

In terms of designing a subscription-based game that retains players and makes efficient use of content, it makes a kind of sense to design a Skinner Box that rewards your players for spending time on the least fun content. This is where Moloch drives MMOs.

Pay to play a game designed to minimize fun per hour. The main thing we seem to learn from playing MMOs is that you will have more fun not playing MMOs.

: Zubon

And this is Town of Salem, where even killing someone just shifts them to spamming graveyard chat:

Sadly, Town of Salem does not let you mute players. [Update: /ignore name to ignore people.]

: Zubon

Mafia (also known as Werewolf and a dozen other variations) is a piece of gaming literature, for which I knew the rules but never got around to playing. This weekend I tried out an online variant under the name Town of Salem and proceeded to play 17 games in a row.

Mafia is a PvP game of social deduction. You have a town of people, a few of whom are secretly the Mafia. The Mafia kills someone every night in their plan to seize power. Every day, the townspeople (including the hidden Mafia) can vote to lynch someone. Night follows day until one side is eliminated.

The town has numerical advantage. They will definitely have some losses, but when there are three Mafia members out of 10-15 in the town, having more bodies means not only more longevity but also more people watching for suspicious behavior. The Mafia has a coordination advantage, because the Mafia members know who is in the Mafia.

Variations include changing team composition, whether notes are allowed, and giving players special abilities. Online games allow more options for secret communication or abilities that might be awkward in physical games. Town of Salem gives every player a role with a special ability and includes neutral roles, such as the Jester who wants to by lynched. I am torn between enjoying the additional flavor and wondering whether it spoils the purity of the original game. The default game only uses about half the roles, with limited variation, but other options can use them all.

As my 17-game binge suggests, it is immediately engrossing and addicting. I can see why some conventions have continuously running games that successfully sell “all you can play” passes.

: Zubon

I rarely pass along press releases or advertisements except to mock them, but Stardock gets a nod for this one:

Come see what’s been keeping our players busy ruling their galaxies, with over 41,538 games completed, 7,158,087 ships destroyed, and 1,706,224,660 credits awarded since Galactic Civilizations III‘s May 14 launch.

Granted, we mock MMO PR for statements like “accounts” or “characters created” instead of “subscriptions,” and Stardock is providing these numbers instead of trumpeting something like a #1 sales rank, although you can get anything to #1 if you define your sub-sub-sub-category carefully enough…

: Zubon

Because all of your experiences happen from your perspective, it is common to generalize and assume that others’ experiences are more or less like yours. Over time one learns that this is often not the case, from different life circumstances to different preferences to different brain configurations and chemistry. This last is the subject of one of the most interesting discussions on the internet, where some people have well known but uncommon mental experiences (synesthesia, photographic memory) and others explain their realizations that either they have experiences most people do not or (the topic of the original post) they lack experiences everyone else has, like a sense of smell. “Wait, people don’t just mean that metaphorically?”

At one point, the topics wanders to video game achievements. Commenter Doug S covers a lot of ground:

I don’t know exactly why I feel compelled to earn Achievements or Trophies when playing video games, or want to see my characters level up, or things like that, even if I don’t actually enjoy the process of doing it. Must be that “wanting” vs “liking” distinction.

Sometimes I wonder why I should bother getting every little thing in a game. This frequently leads me to wondering why I’m playing the game at all, or playing any game, or choosing to do anything at all rather than nothing. Then I suffer from depression symptoms. Having come to the conclusion that questioning these impulses reliably leads to depression symptoms, I’ve stopped doing it.

Others report similar senses of differences between compelling gameplay and enjoyable gameplay, which is somewhat of a recurring theme around here.

: Zubon

The flip side of intentional gaming is that many things are compelling but not entertaining. You feel driven to complete the level, get the achievement, do the thing. You do not actually like the game (anymore?), but it appeals to your brain chemistry in a way that keeps you going, keeps you coming back.

That was my experience with social media games. The gameplay is usually crap, although you can create your own interesting time management game out of juggling a half-dozen of them. During college, my wife did not really enjoy Civilization II but played many late nights of it because its “just… one… more… turn” gameplay is that compelling. You can get remarkably engrossed and engaged without stopping to think, “But do I really like this?”

I approach this from an Achiever point of view, because treadmills and achievements are often how games keeps people hooked, but it applies to all approaches. In my Explorer guise, I have frequently given games, books, and shows another few hours to “get good” even after recognizing I was not enjoying myself. There is always a steady stream of Killer content to keep you fighting for the top of the hill even after you stopped caring about that hill, and few things activate your brain’s instinctual programming like the illusion of mortal danger mixed with status competitions. Of course, since we come from a species of social primates, huge swaths of society are effectively traps for Socializers, engaging our socializing brain modules while providing no real content, emotional satisfaction, or other recompense.

Our brains evolved in a physical environment. In a digital environment, we are still executing all the adaptations that got us here, even if they no longer provide value or even make much sense.

: Zubon