Kill Ten Rats

I was watching Once Upon a Time recently, and it was just not selling a death scene. It should have been a significant death, but I never much liked the character, writers frequently kill characters who have completed their plot arcs, and there was another character on-screen who was recently resurrected. How does the show deal with the lack of emotional resonance? Cue the sad music.

The music tells you how you are supposed to feel about the scene. Continue reading Manipulation Through Conspicuous Non-Manipulation

Most games have learned that players respond better to incentives than penalties, even when they are mathematically equivalent. Instead of having a hunger debuff, food provides a buff, and all the content is balanced with the assumption that you are using food buffs. One World of Warcraft design included a bonus to XP when you started playing, decaying to neutral and then a penalty over time; this was changed to a Well Rested buff that does exactly the same thing, where playing without the buff means earning XP at the old penalty rate.

The latter is an example of the common incentive to play periodically for a moderate amount of time rather than trying to go from level 1 to the cap in one massive binge. Playing in moderation is better for your health, the game’s community, and the long term health of the game. Examples of systems that support this are daily rewards and bonuses that accumulate during offline time like the xp bonus in WoW or LotRO or the explicit “offline time” in A Tale in the Desert. The core idea here is providing a bonus the first time you do something today, which makes the first time very rewarding and creates an implicit penalty for farming.

The implementation of the Zen Garden in Plants vs. Zombies 2 is an interesting example. You have 6 to 12 flowerpots. You plant a sprout in each that gradually grows to become a boost. (“Gradually” means hours, although that can be shortened.) A boost gives that plant a large bonus for one round.

In practice, that means your first few rounds of play include at least one boosted plant. With some care, you could have a really awesome round in which every plant is boosted. You will crush that round and laugh in the zombies’ faces. And then you are back to normal. You re-plant your sprouts and either do something else or keep playing normally.

The Far Future world, introduced with the Zen Garden, seems to be balanced assuming you will be using some boosts. This both creates chances for highly skilled players to face greater challenges and provides more casual players with a boost to get past that.

: Zubon

Which is not to imply that casuals are unskilled, but we expect the hardcore to get better with all that time they spend. Being “hardcore” in Plants vs. Zombies is an atypical life decision.

Refering to something as a cargo cult means that it is repeating the external appearances but ignoring what makes it work. It is a form of magical thinking, that the ritual is what is important. The mental image you should get is someone on a Pacific island after WWII, trying to summon an airplane full of supplies by stamping out a “runway” in the dirt and wearing a “headset” made from coconuts, phonetically reciting landing orders and hoping the planes arrive. The important notion here is not copying but going through the motions and seriously expecting it to work. (See also cargo cult science, Feynman’s popularization of the meme.)

Copying works if you copy the right things. Your cheap knock-off may be missing some features or polish, but there is a market for cheap knock-offs. A taco or t-shirt is still a taco or t-shirt. In gaming, we often politely refer to them as genres, although some are still “Diablo clones.” (MOBAs recently made the transition to genre from “another DotA”.) Other games “borrow” motifs or characters, so we have fads of zombie games, brown “realism,” and a smaller number of snarky, passive-aggressive robots. “WoW with lightsabers” actually sounded like an extremely lucrative idea.

We get into gaming cargo cults when developers or producers have no idea why they are copying things. The market leader has X in the game, so put X in the game. And they seriously expect to make a lot of money, not to make a cheap knock-off. See the infamous keyring. See anytime an executive gives an interview that boils down to “you have to copy WoW to win.” (Those seem to have tapered off.)

Funny thing is, copying can lead to improvement. While there is a first mover advantage, seeing where the first mover tripped can help you get further. (This is where Blizzard has been known to excel.) Maybe the essential feature is not what the original developers thought, and the game works well in spite of, not because of, some core aspect. Are forced downtime, forced grouping, or unrestricted PvP assets or mistakes? We have games gambling on each side of that. Is the economy the heart of the game or an unfortunate distraction? How good is the gameplay when you strip it to its core? The real meta-game is seeing what works in making games.

: Zubon