X-fire and validity.

I fell for ye olde trap, the Internet Debate, and naturally failed to convince anybody of anything I had to say. (Syncaine and his boys are a tough crowd, to boot.) Anyway, the reputable Syncaine (and others) still maintain that X-Fire is a valid source to use as a predictor for the collapse of games, despite liberal application of sampling bias or the sheer definition of validity i.e. a formula is valid if and only if it is true under every interpretation. Their arguments seemed to boil down to:

• we have nothing else to go by;
• I’ve seen consistency, I swear;
• what’s a third variable?

I see this kind of stuff too frequently in blog-o-land and I guess I have this unconscious, feverish, and vain hope it will some day go away. Especially in MMO-land…I mean there are so many people who sit down and reverse engineer the non-linear, multivariate functions that model damage, speed, and defenses in these games you’d think that sort of mathematical adeptness would translate over to basic statistical analysis. To be fair, no amount of statistics is basic, really. I took three of those courses and they were so dreadful. All I really took away was that small, angry Korean professor yelling “Support! Support! Support!” and growing increasingly frustrated with the flip-flop of the terms “function” and “variable”.

It is likely the case that trends, peaks, and troughs in a full game’s population are somehow reflected in X-fire graphs. That’s really what people are riding on. The problem is that trends, peaks, and troughs in X-fire populations (all that those graphs actually represent) probably do not reflect on the full game’s population.

You probably read that and are thinking either “w…t…f is thade talking about” or possibly “this thade guy is such a turd.” But stick with me a second.

We (or at least I) don’t have demographics for for X-fire users, much less demographics for the entire gaming population for a given game. World of Warcraft is probably the easiest to discuss in an armchair statistics hand-wavey way, so let’s go there. It has like 10 million subscribers (as of a few months ago, back when it dropped an equivalent of, like, half of EVE online’s subs) who – if fans and cosplayers at PAX are any indication – are demographically all over the board. If it’s the case that there’s a statistically representative cross-section of this massive fanbase in the 50-70k WoW players that x-fire tracks, we have a winner: we could use those X-fire graphs to build a predictive model.

What if, however, the X-fire sample is not representative? If, for instance, the X-fire population is completely devoid of women over 30, players who’ve never played an MMO before WoW, etc., then the graph is only really valuable for predicting and discussing the trends of that specific sub-population. For instance, just because the (I’m totally guessing here) 15-27 yr old X-fire user base decides Mists of Pandara is stoopid doesn’t mean the host of married couples playing the game don’t think it’s the shit. So, in that contrived example, a downward trend or hard dip in X-fire data may mean absolutely nothing insofar as global trends.

There is – very, very likely – some relation between X-fire trends and global trends; what the comparative slopes are, utterly impossible to determine. It’d still be difficult, even if we had all of the data we’re lacking.

That was really my entire point (which I failed to communicate firing from the hip yesterday) and all I wanted to get across. If you see months and months of steady down-ward trending on X-fire, it could very easily be due to a global population down-trend; but it may only be X-fire users. Since we don’t even have that backlog of information, let alone the demographic data we’d need to really hammer this out, saying anybody is foolish for questioning is, well…embarrassing.

If you’re going to state facts, back ‘em up. If you’re going to state your feelings or suspicions, it helps to back those up too, but you can be a little less rigorous there. Just don’t say “This is my feeling; here are some demonstrably non-facts I will now present to you and defend as if they are facts.” It makes the whole scene here look bad, you know?

Caveats of Sandbox Design.

I see it all the time. Assertions that sandbox MMOs are better than theme parks (coupled with requisite hate for the theme park genre) basically hit my radar once a week; probably yours too. You probably wonder (much as the champions of the sandbox do) why is it that so few studios do it? Why is EVE one of a precious few, whereas the parade of fantasy theme parks seems endless?

Our understanding is fortunately bolstered by the metaphor that’s already in-place: a theme park is more fun for more people than a sandbox. Eschew for the moment the financial disparities between Six Flags and that 4′ diameter green plastic turtle…the one filled with cheap aquarium sand in your back yard…and consider instead what style of fun each one offers.

First, the easy stuff. The theme park gives you roller coasters, bumper cars, merry-go-rounds…well-defined activities for you enjoy, roughly on your own schedule. They’re well-defined because you know more or less what you’re getting into at the gate, how long it will probably take, and if you liked it you can do it again. While it’s short and probably the least creative roller coaster I’ve ever been on, the Steamin’ Demon at the Great Escape in Lake George, NY will always hold a special place in my heart. I’ll stand in that line twice in a row, every time. If I bring my friends along for the ride, we all have remarkably similar experiences. I mean, who doesn’t like a good roller coaster?

The sandbox gives you sand, a good-sized but confined space, a set of tools like buckets and spades, and lets you make your own fun. That’s the beauty, right? There are clear resources and tools that have pre-defined uses, but you can do whatever you want. You can use the tools or not, or even use the tools for tasks that the makers didn’t initially intend or even imagine. You can shape the resource, gather it, spend it, squander it. You can share it with friends and – working together – you can create some interesting and at times  unpredictable things.

In a theme park, the fun is laid out and carefully planned for you.

In a sandbox, you’re handed some stuff and told to to make fun for yourself.

While the metaphor is a bit leaky at this level (plastic turtle vs million dollar roller coasters) when the playing field is leveled out as it is in a video game, the appeal is clear. It’s really cool, both fundamentally and in practice, that things you do affect the game play of others. The players are the content.

Now, here is the catch: the reason so few studios try it.

If you’re waiting in line for a roller coaster, and some guy throws sand in your eyes and shoves you to get in front of you, the staff steps in and kicks that jerk out of the line or even out of the park.

If you’re in that sandbox and some bigger kid sits down and shoves you aside, throwing sand in your eyes and laughing as he does so, whelp…you either fight back (and possibly get creamed) or you get really frustrated and stop using the turtle.

Is it any wonder then that the massive volume of Theme Park MMOs all have a cumulatively large player base than sandbox MMOs? It’s not appealing to everybody that they might get shoved out of line and not be able to get on the ride. Now, sure, some people tough it out and have a good time of it…even becoming big kids in the sandbox themselves. And that forms some interesting gaming etiquette…as you get individuals who stand up for the little guys, helping them into the sandbox; one fascinating repercussion here is EVE University, an organization of such big kids that help little kids learn to fend for themselves in the sandbox.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that sandbox design is flawed or even inferior; it’s got a lot of cool stuff going for it. It is however a substantial risk to take from the point of view of a big studio: why make a game with a limited demographic appeal when we can make a game with a larger demographic appeal? More people equals more money, and that is ever the motivator.

Every so often some ballsy little studio comes out of the woodwork and throws caution to the wind; it’s these guys we get the more creative titles out of (where creative in this case means mold-breaking as opposed to mold-refining) and that will probably remain true until one of them shows investors it can pull in what the big boys do.

I would like to see more sandbox elements in MMOs that are up-and-coming. I have doubts we’ll see them anytime soon.

Video games are not art.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I ran across this article, bulleting out some extrapolations (with a little and – at times – a lot of conjecture) from an article by Rodger Ebert. The first article is an easy read (quick) while the second one is a bit more dense (it’s Ebert) and has a very long load-time (long-ish post, 4k something comments on the same page, and a  half dozen embedded videos that all want to load previews).

Naturally this re-ignited my nerd-fury re: Mass Effect. No, I’m not over it and, no, I don’t foresee this summer’s free DLC really mitigating that. The real reason is that they made the very mistake that these two articles put forward: they tried to go art when they should’ve stuck with game. They’re going to stick to their guns, as I understand it: fleshing out their ending as opposed to giving us more options to – you know – avoid the required death of  galactic civilization, the probable death of the Shepard, and the awkward plot hole where members of my squad – who were on ground zero fighting for Earth – were magically jumping between Mass Relays for no discernable reason whatsoever.

I guess that’s what happens when resources are reallocated to an MMO which – by the way – is still a good time and has more than the lion’s share of both tragic, bitter ends and super-happy cheesy fanfares.

No Scooby Doo Ending? No Mega Happy Ending? For shame.

Let me be clear.

Games can use Art as a mechanic. Art can use Games as a mechanic. They are still separate entities.

Mass Effect’s core game play mechanic was choice. You made a decision. Things happen as a result and your decision obviously matters, in a big way. Talk Rex down or kill him. Ashley or whoever that guy was. The Quarians or the Geth. You choose, something happens. It can be catastrophic, but that’s okay…because you chose it. The game teaches you that you have a choice.

Yet at that very moment when they should have leveraged their core mechanic in the biggest way possible, they let it fall on it’s face. Grab the beamz, jump in the beamz, shoot the thingz, Shepard’s dead (or mostly dead), galactic civ in ruins, major plot-hole, it was all a story. Epic, epic fail. The only real visible differences?

• Whether Shepard dives, grabs, or shoots.
• What the color of the light show is.

I would have had zero complaints if the three endings were all catastrophically different. It’d be okay if Shepard died in most or even all of them, provided they were extremely different. The worst part is you had a good foundation to make them different (the three choices are described as if they are) but…yea, I could go on all day.

Bioware, make no mistake. This is your greatest oversight. I’m sure you’ll learn from it and future games will be great. And I really did enjoy Mass Effect as a whole. But, man. You really let me down.

Investing in entertainment.

Guild Wars 2

I couldn’t be less impressed or less excited for this waste of resources.

That’s a little harsh, even for me. Let me ease up a bit.

I saw some videos and was disappointed. No mind-blowingly cool tricks or new mechanics presented. Maybe they’ll come up later. Syncaine is presenting it as the game that Mythic tried to make. It’s funny because GW2 seems to me like Wrath of Heroes with a bit more polish and some grinding elements. (What, other people can make baseless, offhand comparisons and I can’t?)

Joking aside, I don’t see the appeal. To be fair, I missed out on the whole Guild Wars scene when it launched; I heard bad things about it early on (which were valid, by all reports) and by the time all of that was cleaned up I was deeply entrenched in other games with no desire or reason to seek out others. Possibly you were a huge GW fan and you’re all sorts of excited about the Mesmer. I wanted to be excited about this caster everybody wanted; I mean, casting gameplay is what MMOs really do well, as – up until Majicka – no other gaming genre really hit it (Arx Fatalis and Master of Magic being the only real exceptions). I’m not writing this title off just  yet, but I’ll let it cook a few months and see how the community is taking it. (Also known as: my original plan for Diablo 3.)

The Secret World

The Secret World’s beta starts on May 11 and I have a key that I got at PAX. I don’t know what the limits on the key are (if it’s only for the weekend, or for the run until June,  for multiple weekends, or as much up-time as they can get out of their fledgling servers, I’m not sure) but I think it’s safe to assume I’ll get to try it at least for a few hours. The goal here for me is to see if the game play is so terrible that is trashes my morbid curiosity with regards to the alternate reality game play. The idea of learning  real-world history and myth in order to conquer a video game is very appealing me. Also, let’s face it: Matrix: Online reportedly had tragically bad game-play and control issues, but it was a cult-hit due to its alternate reality game. I really don’t want to miss this…unless I can’t stand the game play, in which case I’ll just follow along as best I can via the blog-o-sphere. I am giving you a try, Funcom. I gave EVE a try. HOW COULD YOU DO WORSE?

(You are allowed to quote that line and force-feed it to me in the event that it does far, far, far worse than EVE in every measurable way.)

Diablo 3

Oh, Diablo 3. Should you fail, there will be no reason for me to follow you on the blog-o-sphere.

Initially I wanted to wait and see if it survived the first two months before diving in…but but so many of my friends pre-ordered and I honestly did enjoy what little of the beta I saw, so it seemed a small risk.

Unlike GW2, I 1. was part of the Diablo and Diablo 2 experience, from launch to vapors, and 2. see some remarkable new tricks and game play mechanics. Also, this right here is reason enough.

Where I discuss value for money, or

Where I title a section after the stylings of Spinks and other legendary authors.

$15/month for SW:TOR. $60 up front for Diablo 3. I may license Secret World and play it for a month or two before my interest in it buckles…or I may stick it out. I’m sure that’ll be like, $60 plus the expected monthly account leech.

By my reckoning, a night at a bar costs between $15 to $30, depending on whether I buy the lady and/or a friend drinks, or if dinner is involved. I do not go out to a bar often, but when I do, that’s a night of fun. $15 for a single night is now our model.

Choose your MMO. If you log in once a week, that $15 gets you four nights of fun after which you can legally drive at need and probably won’t wake up next to somebody strange. $60 will license Diablo, and if I  play that for four nights, it meets the model. If I play it further, I’m getting effectively free entertainment. If I play an MMO more than four nights a month, the same thing is happening.

Software-as-a-service is very common in the industry now, as including support, updates, and a finite time that the software you purchased will function is how virtually all business-to-business licensing transacations are making money nowadays. We’re now seeing this trend in the small-time (that’s us) with video games.

More to the point, paying for entertainment is not weird.

Maybe I should say that again.

$15 at a bar is paying for entertainment. $20 for a movie,  $60 for a concert, paying for entertainment. $15 to $60 to buy a video game license, you’re paying for entertainment. Paying for entertainment is not weird.

Changes coming to my rotation.

LoL is on the bench, though it’s still on the list. I like it but I needed a break. I’ll go into details in an upcoming post.

Minecraft is the best loading-screen game of all time. My friend and I are doing an improvisational collaborative structure, where each of us logs in, goes to the site alone, adds something, then waits for the other to do the same before returning. Also, I have built six stylized towers and am planning out two more.

I’m having a lot of fun with SW:TOR. Good people and the pinnacle of the theme-park genre makes for a nice time. Doesn’t hurt that a recent parsing of my combat logs shows me I do about 30% of the damage in a boss fight. (Please don’t nerf me.)

LoL will probably get bumped when TSW and D3 drop. I could easily reduce SW:TOR to a three to four night a week event and still have a spectacular time with it; really I have room in my rotation for one or two more games. The trick here is that D3 will fit that slot very well (easy to play solo and dynamically) while TSW by its very nature may be more EVE-like in it’s demand for my attention and time.

Remember my metric, however. If I play  Diablo 3 for four nights it’s already met the metric in terms of fun/dollar. Any more than that and it begins to exceed bar-night fun time in cost-effectiveness.

So will I lose anything by trying both titles? No.

Are you still listening to that guitar?

Because if you are, you know exactly what I’m feeling.

I can’t wait.

This is the most awesome thing ever.

Thanks to my old friend gamedev.net for bringing this to my attention.

DOTA2 will charge you to play based on how big of a jerk you are.

Go and read it. It speaks for itself. And it is actually the most awesome thing I’ve seen in gaming in a long time.

Diablo 3 and TERA

I got to try both this past weekend as they were both in open beta. TERA I played for maybe thirty minutes until I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was like an awkward FPS coupled with a very creepy presentation. To spite the game’s visual design I actually made a character that was a 12-14 yr old girl with fox ears and a fox tail; naturally she was fan-service-tastic and made me feel uncomfortable. The game is otherwise unremarkable. It didn’t catch me.

Diablo 3, on the other hand, surprised me a bit. My first foray was a Wizard to level 8 or so and it was rather “Diablo 2″ but prettier. I tried again later in the weekend as the Barbarian and had a rather different take away. Here’s my analogy:

Diablo 2 is to Diablo 3

as

Super Mario Bros. (8-bit Nintendo) is to  Super Mario World (Super Nintendo)

Diablo 3 is still a dungeon hack. Super Mario World was still a platformer. They’re each substantial upgrades – both in presentation and mechanics – over their predecessors.

Maps are still randomly generated but they look and feel better. You still smash a lot of monsters but the control is more intuitive, the abilities all feel useful, and the customization is fun. The fact alone that my “pole barb” and my “sword’n'board barb” can now easily be the same character is remarkable to me. I can swap out equipment and ability mappings and in seconds I’m a different build. There’s absolutely no draw back to trying a new ability when you get it as – whether it jives with  your play style and gear or not – you are not bound to it. You literally can’t make a game-breaking mistake in character building anymore. If something doesn’t work, try something else.

I don’t see myself playing it to the exclusion to all other games (as I did its predecessor) but as I have a host of friends picking it up that do not play SWTOR, I will buy it. It’ll be nice to play with those friends again, if nothing else.

Also, hitting things as a Barbarian is tremendously satisfying. The thwacks and wallops sound and feel perfect to me. Barbarian combat was more God-of-War-like than any dungeon hack ever.

One thing disappoints me: I don’t have a dog that will cart my stuff to town and sell it for me. I’m over it though.

Spinks (per usual) has a fantastic article on D3 over on her site; if you’d like more detail (and some valid criticism against the stupid shoes that the female Demon Hunter is wearing) you should head that-a-way.

What EVE, SW:TOR, and The Secret World share in common.

Yet another attempt at a sensationalist title. (How’d I do?) It comes today in the form of a weird thought I had on this morning’s train ride, dating back to a very old gamedev.net thread. That thread made a call to the community of game developers at large. A request.

End goblin genocide.

“When it gets to that point, it’s a little irresponsible when we fail to consider the ecology or culture of the creatures we mindlessly slay. Don’t these goblins have families? They tend to have money of some kind, does that mean they have a culture? An economy? Ever stop to think about *why* it is they attack our towns?”

There have been other threads (on gamedev and elsewhere) over the years that either hit the same riffs or directly cite that very post. (The thread was removed by some dev on the site – bit of a conspiracy there – so it’s only accessible via web archives now.) There was also this epic Gamasutra article in a very similar vein…hitting Diablo and it’s entire progeny pretty hard:

“The beings who live here… what shall I say of them? Firstly, that they are uniformly hostile. We have released a few prisoners, who always flee without offering to assist us… a shabby, ungracious way to treat one’s benefactors. Yet apart from these churlish wretches, all others that we have encountered have attacked without challenge or parley of any kind. And so we kill them.

Oh, God, how we kill them.”

Experience systems which are based on unjustified murder have been around a very, very long time. Violence made it to video games early as it was the easiest part of exciting stories to model, at least in the beginning. Reading reams of text on an amber monitor isn’t always what you’re in for (Zork was great but it wasn’t for everybody) and so games like Nethack/Moria were much more popular.

But what about now? I see Diablo 3, TERA, and Modern Call of Wuty coming out with some  new mechanics and textures, but the same basic mechanic at play.

Violence as a mechanic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are times in life where lines are drawn and violence becomes necessary; in the defense of one self or one another; this isn’t a post on ethics anyway. Violence is a scary resort; it’s the point in a story when two sides are pushed to their limits, with somebody’s survival often in the balance. This is exciting stuff and the easier stuff to model in a game. Easier than negotiation (which is better modeled in a book or on screen).

But that’s no longer true, is it? We now have the means and the experience to add new dimensions to our games, and a lot of people are already doing it.

SW:TOR

Cinematic presentation as a precursor to violence is one thing (and a good thing) which Bioware has been excelling at of late…but what it also does is that it allows you to talk your way out of fights. You can’t talk your way out of every fight, but it’s not an impossibility in all cases. How many cases wasn’t clear to me until now as I’m leveling a second consular as pure Dark Side…and she’s fighting a LOT more during dialog sequences. Not only can you talk your way out of fights, but you can pick them. This is a good start, in my mind. I want to see more.

EVE

EVE has a special place in this line up as the content is people. Numeric experience gain is a non-issue here as your skills train over time and not only by doing or killing. (I specify “numeric experience” because real in-game combat experience is universal across these titles, so I’m eschewing it for this discussion.) And because much of the content is other people, your ability to talk your way out of a fight is as good as your real-life negotiating skills. And also, how scary your ship and/or your friends appear.

I’m not a fan of experience gain that’s effectively not interactive. (Training Rank X of Skill That Adds No More Than 5% to This Confusing Characteristic does not appeal to me.) However, violence is not a prerequisite to advancing in EVE: that’s my point.

The Secret World

TSW is half going the Bioware route in that you’ll be given lots of narrative justification for violent conflict, and there may be alternate reality game stuff that involves rather EVE-like negotiation between factions…but the real new thing here are the so-called Investigation Missions. There are quests in this game that require you to use real world information sources (like actually do some real world research) and learn about ancient history, folklore, and myth to solve a  puzzle in the game. Follow a trail of clues in the game with no Map Markers to guide you. It’s a bold move and I hope that it’s both 1. as good in practice as it’s been presented and 2. as fun as it seems.

Honorable Mention that I snuck in: Minecraft

That’s right. Minecraft. Gather your resources, build  your shelters, and survive. This game is a lot of fun co-op and – given how trivial it is to punch through structures as a player  - PVP is kind of silly. But it’s a game where there is no real “experience” (your “levels” are little green balls gained from killing monsters that you use to enchant weapons and tools…while this is nice, it’s not a requirement). Your skill with the game is what counts here; there’s really no number attached to it at all.

In Conclusion

I’m not saying that I want the removal of violence from video games; far from it. I enjoy digital combat and I really appreciate how far it’s come. Consider fighting the dragon in Adventure, running and gunning through Contra or Doom, and fighting through God of War. What I am saying is that I want to see more alternative paths presented for advancement. We have the means now. Let’s see it.