Chopping off the fingers

I am going to hold off on this blog for a while and maybe repost it in another format. I see a lot of potential here, but right now I just don't have the time to keep it fresh or get it out there and grow its audience.

To any who might stumble on this, you are welcome to shoot me an email to see how things are faring: ransome.coleman@gmail.com

Flatland

There is a relatively new genre of games out there are called alternate reality games and according to Wikipedia they take place half in the virtual world and half in the "real world". One of the more popular ones in recent history was "I love Bees", a promotional ARG for Halo 2. ARGs do not have to take place over a means of communication as Wikipedia might have readers believe. Some are held in locations, using pre-existing structures as game pieces, as in the case of the Graveyard Games.

I find alternate reality games to be intriguing mostly because their playing ground is metatechnical (no, metatechnical is not a word). By this I mean, they are generally organized across the same medium as a video game (the internet), but are executed in real time without need for code or models or a client. This differentiates ARGs in two very important ways:

1.) Components of ARGs must occur at a set time and their occurance will always lead to a widespread change for all of the players involved. Compare this to a video game, where something happening on one client has no affect on another. Or, in the case of a multiplayer game, instances are created and removed time and time again with little static consequence.

2.) ARG's players are aware of a seperate reality outside of the norm, yet contained within it. Video games are often thought of as a fake reality. Generally the virtual world and the physical world are considered seperate from one another, though that is certainly not the case. ARGs have the unique opportunity of turning the "real" world into a game. Players who participate in the game live in a collective seperate reality from those that do not participate. They are sharing in a real experience with real people, rather than a virtual experience with avatars.

I believe games would do well to incorporate more ARG structures. At present most games reward players with virtual items that are only connected to the "real world" by some monetary value other players within that virtual system might place on them. Furthermore, most game's puzzles are contained entirely within the game world. All of the keys to unlock a dungeon, for example, are present somewhere in the virtual landscape. Introducing an ARG element would make the player stop for a while and realize that the game they are playing is reflected in the world around them.

No thoughts yet on specifics of how to better incorporate ARGs into video games, but I believe there is some potential there.

Code Warrior for real

TopCoder is a service in which coders come together in an arena and code solutions to problems, competing against one another to get the best solution in the fastest way possible. Programmers compete for prizes in several disciplines - algorithm, design, development, etc. Big name development shops (AOL, Google, Yahoo, USB, Bloomberg, others) use TopCoder to source candidates for their teams.

A good friend of mine has told me about a project he's been working on to build an online educational game that can actually be evaluated as though it were a class.

A thought that sprung to mind was a cross between TopCoder and an educational RPG.

So, say you have this 3D fantasy world setup and instead of casting spells and swinging swords, you defeat enemies and solve puzzles by coding solutions to problems. Some problems can be coded in 3 minutes, some would take an hour sitting, and some the player would have to devise code for outside of the game and port it in for "grading." There could potentially be several expansions for the game and, after completing the initial courses, the player might venture out into an MMO world and compete/collaborate with other coders.

The cool thing about this game is that its winning condition is not necessary dependent on what the player's avatar is capable of in-game. For example, a person already familiar with all of the concepts an expansion can teach could very easily march through the end boss' dungeon and challenge him from the get-go. Different "zones" of the game would rely on different methods of problem solving so that analysts could get a feel for a player's weak and strong points.

The icing on the cake is that this game is good for everybody involved. It's an easy way to distribute education and has lots of room for expansion, so the company that creates the game has a lot to work off of. Most coders are open to gaming, if not avid gamers, so players wouldn't be hard to find. And finally, statistical data collected throughout the game can not only be used for grading purposes, but for recruiting purposes as well. It's a win-win situation all around. Ever get off of WoW and feel like you've just wasted a lot of precious time that could have been used to complete that Huffman decoder using Binary Trees? Well now you can be playing a game similar to WoW and still be accomplishing something. This is not original, simply a combination of several fields into one.. one that I contend is more powerful than its seperate parts.

Sim Plant

would be a depressingly boring game.

I was a bit mistaken on my last post about G4. The channel is still there, its schedule has just undergone a major revamp. Still, only a few shows remain, but E! has control of what gets aired. So far, however, they've done a good job, airing huge blocks of old Fox shows like Star Trek the Next Generation and Arrested Development (I think I watched half a season last night). So kudos to E! for not turning G4 into E!!(!)

When I code I feel like a sorceror, pouring through books of symbols that I invoke to make my devices come alive. It's all very exciting.

It's funny how, when playing games, our minds must work within pre-existing systems. Games are necessarily bound by numbers in the sense that they must run off of the interaction between resources on a computer. Games display "pwnership" by numbers, who can collect the most or the least or stay the longest or get out the quickest. It's all about comparing "how many" of this or that the player is able to accumulate. Even in a game like "Apples to Apples" in which a player calls out a category and other players have to present their cards and have the original player pick the one that fits best, there is a count up of who has the most wins at the end.

I reflect then on this "winning" condition that there must be some value to compare underlying all games. Life, for instance, has a winning condition of reproduction. Generally, while the quantity of offspring plays as a factor of "winning", the quality of offspring is important as well. I think this is the root of the problem, because even here the win condition is whichever race/gene pool survives longest. It's almost like in the beginning ten gods got together and said to one another "I bet I can create a better race of humans than you." And they all said "You're on!" and all created one woman and one man and let them go at it. But of course, this isn't true, because there are plenty of other creatures besides humans and, while they all follow the number win condition, they are very much dissimilar in their approaches.

MMOGs are pretty open. You can't actually "win" them, and in this respect I believe they are a special breed of game. The "Sims" series also gets props on achieving the "unwinnable, yet fun, game". I think a fun game might be this: a game in which players take turns drawing. Not drawing tickets, but actually drawing lines. So you have a base shape and each player gets ten seconds to draw something extending from that shape. Players cannot cross lines. At the end of the game (let's say, ten turns), everyone gets to see what they have collectively drawn. Funny, no win condition, and yet the "excercise" still sounds kind of fun. Just wait till the adult version of the game is released.

Blog this

Entropia doesn't compare in my mind to the Ephemeris project. Perhaps that's because one is a game and the other is a tool. And who would bother making Ephemeris and for what purpose? To map every star in the galaxy and then predict the rotations of the Earth? Just to implement a detailed virtual sky? That's just whoa.

And on Joystiq.com they are having a feast of entries from the recent (this morning) Nintendo Wii preorder happening. Strangely enough the Wii got a lot of fanfare from my little part of this big country, the "Bible Belt".

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/13/we-wait-for-wii-bible-belt-edition/

As with everything in the Bible Belt, however, things were pretty lame. Only 6 preorders were available at a mall in Athens. That compared to 32 in Philly, 19 in Maryland, and 33 in Boston. I'm sure other places had even higher turnouts.

The next generation systems are close at hand, and it seems every time the "next generation" systems come out there are more and more people excited about it. Which is good. It means the industry is growing and that video games, as a form of entertainment, are becoming more respectable. Unfortunately, however, they aren't respectable enough, as the G4 channel was recently taken over by E! and only its better shows still remain intact.

So while the industry is getting high tech, I am still left mastering the basics. In Zombie Pawns yesterday I restructured the Worldstate to have it contain the level size. I then came up with a template for parsing levels that I will implement this afternoon. Development is moving along slowly because I'm not getting much free time.

As for the original game idea of the day, I was toying with the idea of a game where you play as a tribesman in a head hunter's tribe. Nothing original here really, except I've never played a game in which I was one of several in a tribe competing to chop off important people's heads. I guess it's sort've a hitman knockoff, only less story line and more head rolling.

Better than television

For those who didn't want to muck through my last diatribe, it basically boils down to describing a game with no origins that is free to everyone. So today I will describe a game that has very specific origins and is still free to everyone. This is an MMORPG because everybody loves those (especially investors). In this MMORPG you start off with a Colegate Toothbrush, Puma Loafers, an Express black-tee, and some Levis Jeans. Some of the more astute readers may already know where this is going. For the rest of you, every inch of this game is sponsered by a corporation. Companies pay a little advertising fee every month and in exchange they get a proportional amount of the game world dedicated to them. Some companies may choose to have nothing more than a few items with their brand names and maybe a restaurant named after them. Others will have creatures of great power and even entire zones dedicated to their enterprise. Can't you just see the little kids of the world fending off their mother's sofa with a can of Speghettios? Or powering up with a McDonald's cheeseburger before having imaginary conversations with the action figures at the local Wal-mart? The more a corporation invests, the more influence they have over the game world. This can be in the form of quests, monsters, zones, powerful items, or NPCs. The general population won't have to pay a cent to play the game because the technology will already be in place and the game can be distributed over the internet.

Now, I'm certain this has already been thought of before. I know there is a virtual mall out there where players can wander around and shop and do things in a sims fashion. And then there is Second Life in which CocaCola has their own party island. The place where this branches off from the virtual mall and Second Life is that this is fun and appealing to a different sort of crowd. Think World of Warcraft, only instead of fighting sea monsters with swords you fight Seagate Harddrives with tampons. Seriously, what marketter doesn't secretly want to be a game designer?

Consume This

Today I learned that for half a year I have been forced to manually start my wireless network each time I log onto Unix because of a one key typo in my /etc/network/interfaces file. Strangely, I am not angry or frustrated at this. This is possibly the most absurd thing that has happened to me in the past four weeks. Aside from being exhilerated by the possibility of not having to type out three lines on the console or open my "startup_shit" desktop file (which I can now erase), I am also relieved that I can still make very minor screwups that go unnoticed for months upon months before being discovered by one day of curiousity.

The other strange thing I've noticed today is a parking ticket I'd forgotten about. I am incredibly good at racking up parking tickets (I got a $100 from my own school just for being parked for 10 minutes) and forgetting about them. This one comes from the city of Columbia. The fee ($7.00+$5.00 late charge=$12.00, much more reasonable than $100) does not surprise me. What surprises me is that the reminder was mailed from Columbia's "Customer Service" department. Now, maybe it's just me, but I find it odd that a city has a Customer Service department. What this means to me is that my city does, indeed, view me as a "Customer" and not a citizen or a vistor. I am a consumer and Columbia's product? Parking spaces. I won't go into a long speel about the change in paradigm of a locale being a place to live versus now being a corporate venture, but I just want Columbia, and whoever is reading, to know this: Columbia sucks. And really, I feel betrayed that this city, which I have been living in for a week, values me not as a citizen or a patron or a visitor, but as simply a customer - nothing more than something to leech money out of.

Now, of course, we all know why the consumer/producer mentality has value. Because people need to eat and for people to eat people need jobs and for people to have jobs people need to eat. So it's a nice cyclic relationship that pretty much boils down to "make it where you can, don't bother with where you can't." And this mentality applies to games, because games are a product and that's understandable. In fact, I was playing an excellent product earlier today called EverQuest 2, and it got me thinking, "What is the difference between the real world and EverQuest 2?" (aside, of course, from the glaring differences in how the worlds are interacted with). More specifically, if I could create a virtual world as perfect and interfacable as the one I live in, would there be a difference? And the answer goes back to the oldest question, "Where did reality begin?" See, EverQuest 2 is a collection of resources. I know who created the world of EverQuest 2 and I know that someone out there knows the entirety of its contents. Reality, on the other hand, simply is. It is not a collection of resources, resources are not an inherent part of reality. And I don't know who created reality and I don't know that anyone knows its entirety. More or less the conundrum boils down to the fact that while one is run off an engine created by man, the other simply runs.

Now, forgetting any of the Matrix, this is an interesting realization, and I think to myself, "Can I not, too, create a world with mysterious origins?" Some time back I wrote about a game in which the player finds him or herself as a shape in a world with no foreknowledge of what they can expect. I take this to a different level now and say that this game, if it is ever invented, should also have no apparent source here in the real world. I know with today's consumer culture that people to create such a world are far from rare and closer to impossible to find, but still, it is a nice thought. This world would simply appear in people's emails and across the web. It would take careful efforts to hide its origin. It would be free to the masses, no payment plan, no website. There would be no names attached to the project, no customer support line, no apparent server, nadda, zilch. The world would be a total mystery. You might wake up one day and find an email message directing you to a website that simply says "Enter a world without origins" and a link to a client. How exciting would a mystery like this be? Here, in present day, when all is about making the dollars and cents and everyone wants credit and everything has to be patented and taxed? No website. No authors. No reason for being. Nuts, right?

Some might wonder "Why on earth would anyone want to do this you psycho artsy freak?" Well, with no website, no authors, and no reason for being a world also holds no responsibility. The game can be as ruthless and unfair as reality. Can't connect to a server to get your daily fix? Too bad. You've just become a lowly Square when you were once a prominent Triangle? Tough luck. Who are you going to bitch to? And some might say "Nobody would ever play that game." And to that I say that people will play because everyone will want to figure out what it's all about. People will be driven by their natural curiousity to grasp that which they can't understand and they will return again and again to a relentless world and they will study it and people will claim they know the truth and that they have solved the mystery but no one will ever figure it out. Games are bound by many things. Rules. Percieved fairness. Player ability and comprehension. And, most importantly, marketting potential. To make a game like this would not only be sacriledge or mere jest. It would be a total rejuvination of the pioneering spirit. It would be the most original thing anyone has done to date.