But I Don’t Want to be a Hero.. December 2, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Games, Musings.Tags: Fallen Earth, hero, rpg
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One common feature in MMOs that seems to be a remaining vestige from single-player RPGs is the idea of the player character as a one-of-a-kind world-saving hero. Now (despite lots of evidence to the contrary) I like to assume that players I design games for are intelligent, sophisticated people. So it’s a bit perplexing why an MMO developer would cling onto this player as hero concept – while it makes for great story arcs in single-player games, in a multi-player game the players know that every other player is being hailed with similar hyperboles. While it may lend itself to some good storytelling, ultimately I feel that it breaks player immersion as it ultimately creates an inconsistent storyline (a world simply can’t exist where every single player is the chosen one.)
This brings me once again back to Fallen Earth – the NPCs in this game don’t think I’m anything special, they only care about what I can do for them. In this barren, post-apocalyptic world that feels just about right. I don’t want a game to tell me I’m special or that I’m a hero until I’ve earned that right, otherwise it simply feels hollow.
The “Games as Art” debate November 30, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Musings.Tags: aesthetic, art, artform, Games, interaction, media
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Are games art? A lot of people seem to have a lot of opinions about this. There is a fantastic article today over at Lost Garden discussing the constraints we place upon ourselves as game developers when considering what types of games we could create that would qualify as “art”. I agree with every word of that article but want to discuss something a bit different – what is the point of this debate?
First, let’s see what dictionary.com has to say about art: “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” Are games produced to be something of more than ordinary significance? Yes. Are they appealing? Yes. Do they showcase realms that are beautiful? Yes. So what’s the problem here?
The games industry seems to always suffer from little brother syndrome, always waiting on some outside validation of our worth. We created Grand Theft Auto and said “Ha! Games are not just for kids!” Who were we trying to convince, precisely? Not gamers – those of us who were already adults knew this fact. Now we’re waiting for some magic bullet game that we can show off to the other media industries so we can say “Ha! We can make art to!” Here’s the thing though – this isn’t how art works. My major in college was studio art (well, technically “Art and Visual Culture”, which sounds way fancier), so perhaps my viewpoint on this comes from a slightly different direction than most. Art does not require outside validation. Art doesn’t even require understanding from outsiders. The few times I walked through galleries of modern art I certainly didn’t understand the artwork, but do you think the creators of modern art give a damn? The games industry is suffering a crisis of self-esteem. We don’t need the film industry to pat us on the head and say “That’s some very lovely art you’ve made there”, WE decide when we think a game is art. So let’s stop asking “Are games art?” and start asking “How can we make artful games?” Instead of arguing a binary question let’s push the boundaries and create an aesthetic of interaction. Games, as I’m sure those in the industry will agree, are an amazing medium. We know this, and someday the others will come around. There is no reason for game developers to wait for this day, to wait for outside approval to declare ourselves an artform. Games are art – now let’s ask: What is the aesthetic of interaction? How do we create beautiful, interesting, meaningful games? Where does our artform lie – is it in the game or in the interaction between the game and the player? These types of questions are of much more use than debating whether games can be art in the first place.
Do directions matter in MMO level design? November 29, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Random.Tags: cardinal directions, directions, Fallen Earth, level design, north
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I suspect they do.
Let me backtrack and explain. As I’ve mentioned before, I have an absolutely atrocious sense of direction. This applies not only to real life but in game worlds as well, and I am constantly finding myself confused, mixed up and turned around. The mini-map is my constant companion. Even that, however, can lead to confusion for me as I discovered while playing Fallen Earth today. My mental model of a particular town has it facing entirely the opposite direction than it really does in the game (I’m somehow convinced that the southern gate is really facing north), and so walking around the town while looking at the mini-map is extremely disorienting. I realized that this was in fact part of a larger pattern about how I create mental models of places. The parallel case I found was the town I currently live in – my mental model has my school north of my apartment when really it is east. What’s the connection between these two? When I first spawned in the town in Fallen Earth, I was on the northern part and so walked south to get to the main part of town. This means that the first time I walked around the town, the direction I walked somehow got set to “north” in my mental model. The same thing happened with the real town where I live – the school was the first thing I walked to and so now I’m stuck thinking it’s north when it’s really east.
So somehow, when I enter a new place, the first direction that I walk in gets set to “north” in my mental schema of the local geography. For me, the perfect MMO town would be one where the first direction I am asked to go in is in fact north. While I don’t know that many – or any – people share my particular direction bias here I think it would make an absolutely fascinating study to see what biases do exist in the general population. Geography is so central to the sense of “worldness” in MMOs that it would be beneficial to know as much as we can about this type of thing. Does anyone know of research or articles about cognitive biases with the cardinal directions?
Designing Board Games vs. Designing Computer Games November 26, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Musings.Tags: board games, computer games, dungeons and dragons, monopoly
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As a game designer, I work primarily with MMOs so I’m used to having sprawling, complex worlds to create and work within. For one of my classes this semester, however, I’ve been designing a board game and I’m finding it an unexpectedly intriguing challenge. The key difference? In computer games computers uphold the rules, whereas in board games players must uphold the rules.
This is a whole different ball game. In computer game design there’s a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff we can get away with, and just present the final data to the player in a nice, palatable form. Players in WoW aren’t required to calculate the effects of all their armor on their character’s statistics, the game does this for them. With board games, there’s no man behind the curtain. Players must be able to understand the rules enough to uphold them themselves, and so we are limited not only by the constraints of the human brain, but by the constraints of what people consider fun. As we see tastes vary in all games, the amount of effort people are willing to put into learning the rules of a game varies – most people at some point learn the rules to Monopoly, but a much smaller percentage of people learn the much more complex Dungeons and Dragons. Designing these types of games is an intriguing process precisely because of these constraints, and a worthwhile challenge for any computer game designer.
..and we’re back! with some thoughts about classes in MMOs! November 22, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Games, Musings.Tags: character class, class, Fallen Earth, free realms
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After quite a hiatus (moving to Indiana and the first semester of grad school will do that) I’m back in action, and will be posting on this blog with much greater frequency. After not posting in a few months, that should be easy to do.
I’m currently sitting in my broken office chair and staring at the download screen for Fallen Earth. Buying an MMO is torturous – I finally decide I want to spend the money and get all excited, and then have to wait god know how many hours before the thing downloads. Right now we’re on hour 5 of the download and I think we’re a little over halfway finished.
What this does lend itself to, however, is thinking about MMOs and what I expect from this one in terms of gameplay. One thing in particular that I am excited about in Fallen Earth is that I don’t have to choose a class on the character creation screen. I have never understood this, and suspect it is merely a relic from the old days of D&D. How can I possible choose how I want to play a game before I have even played it? I think that this feature has stuck around so long because of how inward-facing the MMO industry can be. If your target audience is gamers then sure, you can assume that they could figure out what class (and therefore what type of gameplay) they want from your game. Anyone who isn’t familiar with the langauge of an RPG, however? They will be lost, and more likely than not pick a class that doesn’t align with their ideal form of gameplay. With games offering so many different classes, the odds simply aren’t good that they will, by chance, choose a class that lends itself to them.
The obvious way to amend this is to give players a solid taste of the game before they choose a path to go down. Another, perhaps less obvious, solution is to not require players to choose a class at all. In Free Realms, players have a number of “jobs” and can level up in any of them. Different games will require different solutions, but it’s nice to see that at least a selection of MMOs released in the past year are exploring options beyond forcing players to choose their class before having ever played the game.
Wizard 101 Minigame Fairegrounds – a Design Critique July 19, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Games.Tags: game design, mini-games, minigame faireground, wizard 101
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Disclaimer! I think Wizard 101 is overall a very well-designed game, and as a player I enjoy it very much. This post is meant as a critique of only one aspect of the game in particular – the Minigame Fairegrounds.
Players in Wizard 101 have, as in many RPGs and MMORPGs, health and mana. While health regenerates when wizards are in enemy-free areas (rather conveniently), mana does not (less convenient). Wizard 101 has put together a few unique and creative ways for players to gain mana on top of the customary potions, including blue wisps that float around and give players mana when they run into them, and the Minigame Fairegrounds. The Fairegrounds are an area off of the Commons in Wizard 101 where players can, as the name suggests, play Minigames for mana and gold (and possibly other things I have not discovered, my wizard is only level 12). As a lower-level wizard, I found myself resorting to playing Minigames quite frequently as I burned through mana fighting fairies and other myriads of magical creatures.
The Minigame Fairegrounds do not fit into the otherwise quite self-consistent world within Wizard 101. The array of Minigames are more or less tenuously tied to the wizarding theme, and some of them are just wizard-skinned near-clones of popular Flash games. The overall impression is that the mini-games feel tacked-on instead of well-integrated into the rest of the game. While this in and of itself is not necessarily a huge problem, it became detrimental to the game in my playing experience because it was the most economic means (in terms of time and money) for my wizard at lower levels to gain mana. Switching between battling Cyclops and playing a variant of Bejeweled broke my sense of immersion as I repeatedly found myself in need of a quick and cheap mana fix.
The solution to this is to integrate the mini-games better into the Wizard 101 world. What better way to do this than in a manner that strengthens the premise of the game – that you are a young wizard at a wizarding school? Not surprisingly, classes don’t play any part in the game and young wizards are instead sent off on missions to save the school (perhaps the world?) from the evil wizard Malistaire. The closest that players get to the “school” premise of the game is learning new spells from teachers.
Why not be more literal? Why not integrate the mini-games into “classes”? Players low on Mana could go to a classroom and play mini-games that are thematically linked more to learning magic (for example, a mini-game about creating potions). If the existing classrooms are used (there is currently a classroom for each type of magic) then the minigames could also play off the different schools. For example, the minigame in the Storm classroom could be about harnessing the power of (surprise surprise) storms. This would strengthen the theme of the game while at the same time roping the minigames back into the core of the game where they will not cause players a loss of immersion.
What has your experience been playing Wizard 101? Have you found that the Fairegrounds broke your sense of immersion or did you have a better experience with them?
Yay for Originality – Wizard 101 July 17, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Games.Tags: battle, combat, originality, rpg, w101, wizard, wizard 101
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I have been playing a fair amount of Wizard 101 recently and overall the experience has been like a breath of fresh air. It’s not my favorite game in the entire world but it’s just simple plain fun. Sometimes I think that game developers lose sight of this why someone is playing a game and end up creating situations that are too punishing to player mistakes or just outright frustrating. Wizard 101 just feels gentler to me, though I’m sure that this has to do with it’s target demographic, which I’m guessing is far younger than my 24 years (recently prompting my youngest brother to call me a 10-year-old girl. Hazard of the trade!)
The other reason that I’ve found Wizard 101 refreshing is that they have a combat system different from any MMO I’ve seen. The best way to describe it is that they put traditional RPG turn-based combat into a virtual world. When you fight a bad guy you stand across a circle from it and chuck spells at each other in a turn-based manner. The best part, however, is that other players can jump in (up to four players and four baddies in one fight) at any time and help you take down the bad guys. The system ends up encouraging a lot of cooperation, and for the first time in my MMO career I’m actually enjoying fighting alongside other people. There’s no commitment, there’s no kill-stealing, players can just hop in and help out others whenever they want. While many other aspects of W101 are quite standard, it’s great to see a combat model so different from what I’m used to in MMOs creating such a great experience.
If you’ve played Wizard 101, what have your experiences with it been like?
Evony advertising debacle July 12, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Random.Tags: ads, advertising, evony
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If you are a frequent blog reader, odds are good that you have seen some ads for Evony recently.
To refresh your memory, Coding Horror has compiled them all in an article titled “How Not to Advertise on the Internet” , which may give you a clue as to the general response that I’ve seen to these ads.
I personally think that the whole thing is extremely hilarious. One of my favorite things to do with situations like this is imagine the meetings that spawned them. I think it went something like this:
Employee number 1: “We need to advertise for our game! Let’s have the marketing team and the art team put together some imagery that conveys the spirit of our game, the true beauty and depth of the experience.”
Employee number 2: “Boobs sir?”
Employee number 1: “BRILLIANT!”
On the other hand, I wonder how effective this advertising campaign has been for them. Are the type of people who are going to click on boobs also the type of people that are interesting in playing a Civilization-like (from what I’ve heard) game? Regardless, I would love to be a fly on the wall in that company right now to see how they’re dealing with the whole public mockery thing.
Wii Help Cat June 13, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Musings.Tags: help cat, wii
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Not exactly a new topic, but I’ve brushed the dust off my Wii and started playing again (EA Sports Active, more on that at a later date) and was delighted to run into the help cat again.
There is a wonderful article at Lost Garden that sums up why I love this little feature. What are your thoughts?
Getting around in Virtual Worlds June 11, 2009
Posted by jennahoffstein in Musings.Tags: free realms, geography, map, mini map, sense of direction, virtual world
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I have a bad sense of direction. It is truly, truly horrible. To the extent that my childhood friends go into shock when I arrive at some new meeting point without driving around in circles for hours first (granted, the gps in my car helps quite a bit.)
Unfortunately this extends into virtual worlds, and I have to pay extra-close attention to get anywhere that I want to go. I am, oddly enough, pretty good with maps (the benefit of being a visual person) and I make heavy use of the mini maps in virtual worlds. There are certain implementations of mini maps that are particularly helpful / not helpful, and these are a few things that I have found to help me get around:
- Many different levels of zoom. If all I can see is in close and way way zoomed out, I have a hard time fitting the two together in one geographical space. Having several levels of zoom help me do this better.
- Option to keep the map north-up. I can’t even begin to describe to you how helplessly lost I get if the map keeps twirling around to keep my avatar pointing up.
- Labels / icons for landmarks and NPCs. This one sort of goes without saying and seems to be implemented in most mini-maps that I’ve seen.
I don’t know whether these would be as helpful for other people as they are for me, what do you find to be particularly helpful in a mini-map?
Also worth mentioning is that Free Realms gives players the option to show trails that will lead them to where they’re supposed to go for a particular quest (shows up as green dotted line on the ground for the player to follow), this certainly helps me get to quests but doesn’t help me learn the geography of the place. I’m undecided on whether I like this feature or not.
