Category: General

I am a Midwestern suburbanite, visiting the big cities of the East Coast this week. Walking through Time Square, I reflected that it was a lot like home, only bigger, more of everything crammed together. Which is of course wrong, because at larger scales more is different, which in many ways has become the point of the internet.

Before modern travel and communication, your community was the 150 people nearest you, and you had little say in the matter. Now you can go online and pick your community from 100,000,000 people (as well as the people physically near you). And things that could never be sustained in a small community can find a home once you can unite across those wide numbers.

An economist’s blog post (that I can’t find today) remembered his first time seeing pizza for sale by the slice. You need some population concentration for that, otherwise there is not enough of a market to make the economics work.

When Ravious and I met in 2002, it was in A Tale in the Desert. About a thousand people in the English-speaking world thought it would be super fun to come together and digitally pretend to live in ancient Egypt, doing things like making bricks by hand and pushing limestone blocks for the pyramids. (The game is still going in its latest incarnation.) A smaller subset around a dozen thought it would be fun essentially to form a crafters’ commune, which we did under the name “Southren Star Guild.” (Old typo, adopted as a permanent name.) After joining, I saw the guild forums, where existing members thought no one would sign onto a guild charter that more or less said, “You own nothing, we work together as a guild and everything belongs to the guild.” Which, funny enough, is more or less exactly the community I was looking for in an ancient Egypt digital simulation.

One of my online communities recently overlapped with someone who explained that they had taught classes on erotic Colonial America roleplay. (Someone out there just laughed and then remembered that he cybers with elves.) Because there is a market for that, and not necessarily just in America, if only you can find that percent of a percent.

So in New York City, we saw a musical on Broadway. Broadway shows and others tour through our hometown, but Broadway is not just the same thing scaled up for 73 times the population. A population of 8.5 million can support niche shows that will never tour, and it is the proving grounds for what is worth touring. 8.5 million people is fewer than 100 million, but it is certainly large enough to let you pick your own community, if only you can find them.

Celebrate every time you find some weird corner of the internet where people argue passionately about rarepair shipping, substandard copper ingots, or what counts as a grilled cheese sandwich. It took a lot to bring us all together.

: Zubon

The game I’m trying this week is Turmoil, an economic sim about the US oil rush. Buy land, drill well, sell oil. I have had the game for a while, but I was finally prompted to play it by the release of the The Heat Is On DLC (full disclosure: I got a free DLC code).

Turmoil is a straightforward economic sim with time management. You get so long in your oil field. Your goal is to pull all the oil out and sell it at the highest price possible in the time available. Later levels add more complications to the maps (rocks, diamonds, natural gas), and a campaign provides advancement and upgrades. The goal is to make as much money as possible, in the long run buying the mayorship. The expansion brings natural gas in as a factor earlier in the game and adds treasures and magma, along with some new subsystems.

Turmoil is enjoyable in small doses. I should be the target audience for this, but I did not enjoy trying to sit down and binge play. It is too repetitive for that. There is very little difference between levels, and each stage of the campaign has you going through that sort of map 10 times. You can quickly burn through a couple of drilling days at a sitting, and that is enjoyable enough for casual play.

I am enjoying it enough to finish the campaign, but probably not enough to recommend it. People who like this sort of thing may like this sort of thing. I usually like this sort of thing, but it lacks depth and variety. On a sale or in a Humble Bundle, it would be worth the time to play.

: Zubon

My game of the weekend has been Kingdom. It is enjoyable and difficult.

In Kingdom, you are a monarch on a horse who solves problems by throwing money at them. Literally, you have a bag of gold, and your only action is to put money somewhere: recruit peasants, buy them equipment, upgrade buildings. It is a survival game, with nightly attacks. You need to clear four portals from which these attacks are coming.

A key but bothersome part of the difficulty is the lack of save points. If you make a significant mistake, you lose, start over. If you think that you are ready for the next portal and are wrong, monsters destroy everything. There is also no way to know how big the counterattack from the portal will be until you hit it. You need to be aggressive before the attacks become overwhelming, but you also lose for being too aggressive.

If you could save, the big decision points would lose their difficulty; “oh, it’s that big, I should reload and build up for a few more days.” I am not really fond of that school of difficulty. If I know how prepared I need to be, I win; before I know, I either massively over-prepare or lose, find out, then try again. Apart from learning execution, the game should take you about 3-5 tries, learning about how much defense you need before you try each level of offense.

That doesn’t sound very good, but the gameplay is interesting enough for its simple mechanic. There is an economy of recruitment and gold farming (again, literal: you have farmers whose harvest is immediately converted to gold), and the daily flow of expanding by day and staying safe by night. I do not play enough similar games to know whether it stands out, but it has a mix of strategy, economics, and tower defense. It is satisfying to see your kingdom grow and to watch your archers shoot down waves of greedy demons.

My only other complaint of the game is something by design: travel time. As you expand, you can get a kingdom where it takes most of an in-game day just to ride across. This can be mitigated by taking over the portals in the late game, and it is part of the design that movement is limited, but it is just annoying to take that thirty second ride yet again. It would be nice to have a mechanic balancing expansion that did not leave the player just holding down an arrow key and waiting.

Cerebral fun, not action-packed. Recruit, expand, build your Kingdom.

: Zubon

We have been learning about academic assessment at work, and standardized testing has more in common with game design than you might expect. You want a good test of your knowledge, skills, and abilities.

You want a clear target of what you are trying to evaluate. Well designed tests and games present a particular, intentional form of challenge. What skills are you trying to challenge or bring into conflict? A strategy game that is primarily decided by clicking speed or a roll of the dice fails as a strategy game. Some games test visual acuity or memorization far more than their intended primary mechanic. Tests have a similar structure: “construct validity” is the degree to which a test measures what it claims to measure. Bad tests have confusing wording or rely on knowledge not relevant to the construct.

You know that bit where your first person shooter has a required vehicle section? Where your strategy RPG puts a reward behind casino games? Where any F2P game devolves into a cash shop grab? That is the same sort of thing as a test with questions worded like, “Which of the following isn’t incorrect?” or math questions that assume you know the rules of a sport or of soybean future trading. Badly designed games and tests both fail you for no reason you could reasonably anticipate, or you pass by no merit of your own.

Good testing systems need clear and timely feedback. If your result is a single number or an opaque wall of words, it does not help you grow. If you get the results long after the test, you forgot the details of the test or they became moot. This is also a difference between formative and summative evaluation: a final test of what you have learned can be more of a thumbs up or down, but there should be many evaluation points along the way that provide guidance on whether you are on the right path.

“Formative assessment” is a concept some games lack. They jump straight to The Test. You learn by failing and trying again. That can work, depending on the scale of “fail”; dying is not always losing or failing in video games. This is my recurring theme that a game should be at least theoretically beatable on a first playthrough. Your first encounter with something should not always result in failure; it should be forgiving enough to provide a chance to learn, recover, and succeed. A “gotcha” that is impossible without foreknowledge and trivial with it is not good design. A more insidious version is an early cost or damage that guarantees a later failure; you survived that particular challenge, but you are a dead man walking.

Final bosses and final tests should have new elements. Novelty creates interesting and meaningful challenges, not just rehashes of what you already did. But they should be extensions of (and culminations to) the learning process, not something wildly unrelated. If you have ever walked into a final exam and felt ambushed, that was probably bad design, either of the test itself or the materials leading up to it. That does not mean you should always pass the test, but you should have a chance to realize you are struggling before failing. There should be a clear connection between what you learned and what you are being tested on. Platformers that lead to non-platforming puzzle bosses are throwing in a new minigame as a final exam.

: Zubon

I enjoyed Monster Slayers enough to beat it with all 12 classes, so that is an endorsement.

The early game is bad. Monster Slayers has an upgrade grind, and you will not beat the game without spending some time on it. How long is a bit of a question, since because you will be learning the game at the same time, so it is unclear how much of that is “I am failing because I do not know the game yet” and “I am failing because I do not get all my abilities until I fail X times.” (There is also better equipment you can buy in later zones but not equip until you die and start over.) My early game was probably extended because I started with the Cleric.

Start with the Rogue. Continue reading Monster Slayers

I started Civ VI, but it failed to grab me. It felt a lot like going back to an old MMO after a few expansions: all the mechanics are slightly different, in a way that either inspires or alienates you. Some of the mechanics have the same name but changed, some are more or less the same thing but were renamed to a new system, and there are a few new things that synergize with all of that. I feel like I would need to relearn a game I have already learned at least five times.

It feels like an uncanny valley. If it were less similar to what I already know, I could start on a clean page. If it were more similar, it would be a new edition of something I already know, off to the races. It is disorientingly somewhere in between, where the familiarity makes it more alien.

I like the notion of breaking new ground. Veteran players do not always like that (see hatred of hexes from the last edition), but if we just wanted a new version of something we have already played 20 times, we could get the latest Madden or FPS. Trying something new does not always work, but I already have several versions of Civ. I wouldn’t need to buy a new one if this were just the same thing, started over without the systems that DLC will put back in.

Also, my first game started surprisingly cramped. Within a 7-10 hex radius, I have at least two other civilizations and three city states (or whatever they are called this time), and the only reason I don’t have more is because I started near an ocean. This is after having less than the standard number of nations on a map, so either the map is smaller than I think or the other continents must be really empty. On the forums, people speak of starting with other nations literally within visual range. The game is 15 months old, but there is perhaps some work needed before it is ready for release.

: Zubon