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[TT] Tokens of Affection

Love Letter comes with cards you use to play the game and tokens you use to keep score. That there are 13 tokens is elegance in game design.

Love Letter is a game for two to four players. If you have two players, the game is played to seven tokens. The most tokens you will need is seven for the winner and six for the loser. 7+6=13. If you have three players, the game is played to five tokens. The most tokens you will need is five for the winner and four for each other player. 5+4+4=13. If you have four players, the game is played to four tokens. The most tokens you will need is four for the winner and three for each other player. 4+3+3+3=13.

It is a simple thing, but it makes me happy.

: Zubon

Vocabulary 2

This comic happens. There was an old Gen Con sketch from decades ago in which a couple of gamers get arrested after recounting their game of Top Secret (an old spy game) without considering their surroundings.

In Ingress, folks occasionally need a reminder to watch how they phrase things. You are not going to “go blow up the Capitol” or some churches. Leading “an attack on campus” is borderline. Going on a “gardens (or zoo) raid)” is probably abstract enough to be safe.

: Zubon

Vocabulary 1

In the Plants vs. Zombies games, you use walnuts in place of walls (pun intended), with variations like tall-nuts and infi-nuts. You will see other vegetables like butter-flinging corn (kernelpults).

This leads to odd descriptions of games. “I was flinging so much butter, they never even touched my nuts.”

: Zubon

Discrete Units

Ever have one of those days where you will not commit to watching a full movie, but you end up watching five television episodes? My gaming has been like that lately. If it takes longer than a half-hour, I’m probably not motivated to commit to that, even if I might still sit down and play things for a couple of hours.

Casual games have been helpful for that. You have a break point every few minutes if you want to decide you are done, even if you keep playing “one more round” for an hour. Pixelo? Great. Match-3 games? Stellar. It battles against my intentionality in that I did not sit down with the need to play 20 rounds of match-3, but once I’m in, I’m rolling and having a good time.

Which is the goal.

: Zubon

Interitus

I attended the fifth Interitus anomaly this weekend. On the overall score, it was a dominating win for the Enlightened, largely on the basis of the special rule added for this one: every link from several cities to one particular portal in Texas was worth 20 points in the overall score. Before the event, teammates described that alternately as “Calvinball” and “a fair chance for the Enlightened to come back,” the latter of which made less sense to me since either side could go for it. There were 102 documented links (and more submitted late) for the Enlightened and 0 for the Resistance, making it a second golden snitch worth even more than the first one. I have no evidence if this was again running up the score on an empty field except “102-0”?

The nature of that extreme swing was somewhat cloaked because the points were awarded to the two primary sites, so it looked more like two big wins for the Enlightened. Removing both those points and the Resistance points for the global score, the Enlightened carried Santiago and squeaked a victory in Cincinnati, with the Resistance carrying every secondary site by at least 2:1 except for the one the Enlightened won 27:1.

I was on the ground in Cincinnati. Continue reading Interitus

Servers

League of Legends is a game I tend to play when I am not interested in any current MMOs. I appreciate the self-contained nature of each round, versus the ridiculous accumulation over time. I usually quit for several months after the toxicity of the playerbase gets to me, but I find that less of an issue in ARAM. Instead, I find myself quitting because the servers are lousy. I must have had three games in a row where it was a 5v5 game, but I cannot recall that off-hand. I just had two 4v5s in a row, one of which was a 4v4 for the start of the game until a 9th player connected. I know I have several “leaver” marks on my record because the game crashes, I was disconnected, or whatever error causes the game to think that you installed a new firewall between games because that is a reasonable assumption rather than the game’s having connection issues yet again.

I used to make jokes about how many people blamed deaths on lag, but I’ve certainly had those times when I lost half my health while the server decided what I was doing. I used to get annoyed at players who quit or never showed up and wasted everyone’s time, but given the number of times I have been unable to connect to a game, I cannot honestly blame the player. I cannot blame their computer or connection either, because mine will work perfectly for two games then be unable to connect to a third.

This is no easy network engineering problem. You want servers that are reasonably reliable and close enough to your players to reduce latency, while also needed to be close to players who may be anywhere on the globe, a problem only worsened when you form a team with your friend from another continent. A good algorithm for which server to use for a game must be about as hard as for matching up players. But still, it is one of those problems your players reasonably expect you to have addressed when your business is online gaming. And having a 95% solution is not good enough because losing 1 of 10 players every other game is the whole problem.

: Zubon

Circularity

xkcd explains how a fake entry in Wikipedia gets repeated elsewhere then cited as support for the fake entry. There is, you might guess, a Wikipedia page on this phenomenon, although it does not cite xkcd. It does, however, cite an article just published on the subject. This article links and cites the Wikipedia page on the phenomenon.

I really want that to be a prank at a higher level of recursion.

I would also like to note that “circular reference” references circular reporting, which references circular reference. Disappointingly, self-reference does not reference itself.

: Zubon

[RR] Player Character Antagonism and Interaction

Your mileage may vary, but as a GM I find a unified front of players pretty boring. “Why, yes” they all seem to say although only one player is talking, “we all agree and do this.” In real life even something simple like choosing where to go to eat on a group dinner can become a balancing act. Bob’s on a diet, and Fi wants a steak, or at least something from a cow. Throw a vegan in to the mix and the difficulty increases exponentially. No one presses “X” to move along.

The more I play role-playing games, the more I get the feeling that the story isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, a cohesive metaplot would be nice. However, it’s the situations that really seem to stick. Those situations are especially good if players become invested in the outcome. Go for a full boat, when the players want different paths or outcomes.

I just started playing two play-by-post games at RPG.net, and already we’re hitting some great player vs. player or PC vs. PC situations. Continue reading [RR] Player Character Antagonism and Interaction

Windborne Interview with Michael Austin

I snagged some of Michael Austin’s time in the middle of a crazy, crazy week to discuss Windborne. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Hidden Path Entertainment as well as the lead designer / project owner for Windborne. On the Hidden Path forums he is known as Echo. Hidden Path’s site heralds Austin as one of the few experts in the world on Xbox 360 CPU architecture, and his resume includes Call of Duty 2, CS:GO, racing games, and many others. Hidden Path is pretty well known in the PC indie gaming world for their amazing tower defense game Defense Grid, which Austin also lead in design. None of these are social sandbox games.

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Origin of Windborne

Austin said that originally he was messing around with voxel engines, and he found a cool way to do smooth voxels with hard edges. Hidden Path was already looking for another game they could self-finance instead of more work-for-hire jobs. Everybody became really excited about the potential of this simple idea of moving around the voxels in Austin’s prototype engine. That is how Windborne began.

I pushed Austin on Windborne being a completely new genre for Hidden Path. He said with Hidden Path’s history they are more interested in creating “fun, compelling experiences” than sticking to any one or two defined genres. The creative genre has been in Hidden Path’s dream pile for some time, and Minecraft proved that there was an incredible market for the genre. The path they wanted to take in their creative game was to have a very immersive world on top of the creative elements.

They wanted the creations and mechanics of Windborne to provide meaning. There should be a sense of wonder. That was Windborne’s elevator pitch. Continue reading Windborne Interview with Michael Austin