Justin Achilli

Category: video games

9 February 2013

Gamer Challenge: Sharity Drive Results

The Sharity fundraiser and tournament concluded last week, with some excellent results, thanks in part to those of you who took up the Gamer Challenge. Red Storm raised $2759.31 in contributions to fight hunger in our community. Stickers have hopefully arrived for all backers by this point, too, and I’ve seen a few on Twitter.

Interesting bullet-point details include:

• We collected 882 pounds of food for the North Carolina Food Bank

• Cash donations gathered over the course of the fundraiser will provide over 12,000 meals to hungry families

• Because we had our proceeds turned in before the end of the month, the NC Food Bank will match our entire contribution, effectively doubling the contribution

• We more than doubled every previous Sharity contribution Red Storm has made in years prior

A huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who helped push us to those amazing heights — you’ve made a change for the better in many people’s lives.

gamer

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10 January 2013

Toxic Community and the Illusion of Agency

Bioware has a reputation for storytelling, but it’s taken some hits recently. Over at gamesindustry.biz, I saw an article about the negative environment at Bioware’s social site, however.

Part of the negative attention Bioware has received lately I think comes at the intersection of predetermined narrative and player input. With the negative reception for the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy, I think this is a self-created problem for Bioware.

Plainly stated, certain single-player and quest-heavy computer RPGs cultivate the illusion of choice, that you’re in control of the character’s fate. Over time, as the player experiences the game, the illusion grows, but in the end, when the game (or trilogy) concludes, that illusion evaporates abruptly. The end — whether it’s a single ending or one from an array of multiple endings — happens and the player responds with, “What? That wasn’t what should have happened at all!”

dragon_problemAnd that “should have” is the point of divergence from player expectation and the game-as-product that was delivered. In a scripted storyline, as all narrative-construction games must be, because that’s how they’re coded, the player is not in control of his fate. In tabletop RPGs, the gamemaster can’t help but give a mutually achieved story result. In most computer games, particularly those that rely on scripted stories, it’s all but impossible. Marketing, positioning, and development promises for computer RPGs, however, very often posit just the opposite, that every decision the player makes ultimately collects to create a unique ending that is the culmination of his — the player’s — story.

This simply is not true. In any game with a scripted narrative, the best the player can accomplish is some amount of steering the story toward one of the pre-written eventualities built into the game during development. This has always occurred to me as a weird way to allocate development, as well. Your player won’t see a significant portion of the experience you’re paying to develop. It’s as much movie as game, and the player isn’t really telling his story, he’s only pantomiming his version of the permitted story. I remember seeing a marketing promise about Dragon Age’s story component: The claim was that it had as much “content” — a word that represents a loathsome reduction of the craft of storytelling to a product — as nine fantasy novels! Well, so what? If I wanted to read novels, I’d read novels instead of playing a game. And most of that, the player won’t even see, given that he’s making choices in game that wall off a distinct portion of it. “Features a ponderous volume of writing ill suited to the medium into which it’s been crammed, but don’t worry; you’ll never see most of it” makes for a poor bullet point.

The blame here, unfortunately falls on both sides. It falls on the side of the developer perpetuating the lie that the player controls his fate, when really, he’s in control of (meta)gaming his experience toward his desired result. It also falls on the side of the player for not adequately understanding what he’s buying, or, worse, willfully ignoring that reality. Certainly, the player is less culpable in this arrangement — he’s actively being lied to — but, as the old saying goes, fool the player once, shame on you, but fool the player twice, shame on him. For many players, I believe the potential of the outcome outweighed the inherent limitations of the medium, and then reality intruded.

Games that make this plain don’t suffer the same sort of hostility, at least with regard to the illusion of determination. You’re telling Niko Bellic’s story, or Ezio’s story, or Gordon Freeman’s story: There’s no misstatement there. But when the scope of the degree to which the player’s ownership of that story conflicts with what the player has been led to believe, when the amount of Shepard’s destiny that the player controls is at odds with the amount he’s told he controls, that’s where the letdown of expectations occurs. I’m not generally disposed toward the use of phrases like “entitlement,” but in this case the player has been told one thing and given another. So long that continues happening, especially in the epoch of eight-figure development budgets, the feeling of frustration will persist.

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17 June 2012

Design Academy 2012

This morning, we checked into the Château de Châtenay, in Châtenay-and-France, just outside of Paris. I’m here for the Ubisoft Design Academy, which will take place all week, but hasn’t yet started — so I took advantage of the opportunity to walk the grounds and take a peek. It’s a really inspiring environment, removed from the bustle of Paris, where we can all sip vin rouge and talk about what we think makes for great games. I have a presentation to give on cooperative activities in virtual worlds, and the 15 other designers and creative directors in attendance have their presentations to give, too, which I’m really looking forward to hearing, in addition to the curriculum planned by the academy instructors. If I can post the presentation here, I will.

Some of the photos are up at Facebook, if you’d like to see. The guys from Bucharest, Kiev, and Montreal arrived, so I’ll leave you now and meet up with them.

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13 June 2012

IXN Interview

I did an interview with IXN recently, which is a Spanish-language games, comics, and anime site. Here’s the interview in English, should you be interested in such things as design principles, the overlap between hobby games and video games, and my life.

This Charming Man

First of all, who is Justin Achilli, sometimes also known as DJ Achilles?

I’m the sum of my parts. Game designer, writer, cook, DJ, father, husband, son, and brother. I think in particular, I’m drawn to the things that let me interact with other people, such as playing games with them, cooking a meal for them, or entertaining them on the dance floor. I’m a social creature. Gregarious. Like a monkey.

Could you tell us what’s life for a game designer is like?

For me, it’s a professional career. I work a Monday-Friday schedule at Red Storm Entertainment, and in the evenings I head home to work on Vampire and spend family time. Sometimes there’s travel involved, but for the most part, it’s a steady arrangement until crunch time.

Your blog says you’ve been in game designing for about 16 years, which elements do you think are the most important to create and develop an RPG?

For me, the most important element of an RPG is that it allows players the ability to affect the environment. This is really the heart of an RPG: The gamemaster sets the scene, the players interact with it in some way, and then the gamemaster interprets those actions into results. This is where RPGs run by people currently shine above and beyond computer RPGs, which are limited by the logic developers place inside them. An RPG run by a person has infinite potential player interaction and infinite potential outcome analysis. A computer game is a finite series of if/ then, by comparison.

From a design perspective, that’s easy for a designer to achieve because it’s inherent in the function of the game. The harder part, and the part that takes the most refinement, is creating a unique combination of systems and setting that communicates the essential experience of the game. As an example here, look at Humanity in Vampire. One of the essential experiences of Vampire is the struggle against the Beast, which is a setting component and a system. When those two come to the fore, you’ve got something that’s uniquely Vampire as opposed to, say, a sci-fi exploration game or a fantasy monster hunt.

This is a double question… Which do you like better:
Games with an emphasis on narrative over system/mechanics or vice versa?

I don’t necessarily think that these are mutually exclusive. You can have a game like In a Wicked Age in which the system is constructed to foster the narrative, or you can have a game like Risk in which there’s very little inherent narrative, but the narrative arises as a result of the system’s determinations. For me, it’s more of an understanding of the game I’m playing on its own terms. A friend came over the other day and we played Puerto Rico, for example. None of the narrative that emerged from our session had a damn thing to do with Puerto Rico, but the most notable narrative element that emerged was the fact that my wife forced the endgame situation one turn before the plan I was putting together came to fruition. I was so close!

In terms of a “storytelling game,” we’ve always built the systems to be non-intrusive. We don’t have exhaustive rules for every situation that might occur. I think there’s more narrative flexibility in that, with the story directing the rules interpretations. That’s why you see so many things like “The storyteller will determine.…” It’s not saying that one way is better than the other, it’s just the game we’ve chosen to make. I enjoy both narrative systems like Storyteller and games in which the systems are fun to manipulate as well, like Pathfinder/ D&D.

And, game settings with a rigid, ambiguous or virtually non existent meta-plot/backstory?

Here, I prefer a background that has either a lot of “gaps” between the background facts, or has a very broad background with lot of room to focus in on the details that emerge for my troupe. In the first situation, like Vampire, there are a lot of “hooks” in place that give players room to take one of the setting tenets and then do what they want with it. In the latter case, the setting is vague enough that the facts of the game world are defined over the course of playing the game and as a result of it, and I love that.

What I’m less a fan of is a progressive metaplot, in which the game material is serial, and if I miss a book, then I miss something that developed and my next book may or may not have all the facts necessary to run a game in a world in which the printed detail is paramount. The stories really belong to the people playing the game, and the printed material exists primarily to give them a game experience, not dictate the outcome of their game. If my troupe tells a story about the siege of Miami and the Camarilla wins, but then a book comes out that says the Sabbat wins, I feel disconnected from the game. That’s why we’re mostly working with detailed histories and broad modern trends as opposed to current metaplots with the V20 material.

Besides Vampire The Masquerade you’ve worked in a lot of other games, which ones are the most famous or the ones with the highest profiles? And which ones have you enjoyed working on the most?

I was lead multiplayer designer on Assassins Creed: Revelations, which is probably the title of mine that has the most shipped units. I really enjoyed the freedom of working on Requiem, and I really wish we would have jumped into the deep end with it and changed it more from its predecessor, in hindsight. But most of all, I love working with Vampire: The Masquerade. I love its singular confluence of setting and mechanics, and I can always find some unexplored corner of the world that’s casting its own distinct shadow and use that to tell a story.

As a game designer you’ve not only concentrated on pen & paper games. Which other activities you´ve been able to delve in?

Most of my work is on RPGs, but I actually started at White Wolf working on the Rage collectible card game. I’ve worked on board games, as well, and some amount of writing for the Vampire Mind’s Eye LARP rules. Beyond that, I’ve done AAA MMO development, AAA console action-game development, Facebook game development, and a few novels.

You’re a family man, how hard is it to balance a professional life oriented to fantasy/game designing with your family responsibilities?

Everyone in my family plays games, so we do a lot of that in our free time. We play all different types of games, but I think play is healthy for learning and imagination, so I’m glad my daughter does it, and it’s also a wonderful social activity, so I’m glad I share it with my wife and friends. Nietzsche said that, “Without music, life would be a mistake,” and I feel the same way about games.

We know that V20 was created using Open Development system, who was the first one to come up with the idea and how do you feel about the result? Do you think that the future of game development is geared towards open dev?

I don’t know if the collective of future of game development lies with open development, but I definitely think it offers a lot that benefits designers. From the practical aspects of being able to collect far-ranging feedback on a game in design to the more community-based aspects of building a relationship with the game’s players, Open Development has been a huge boon to the ongoing development of Vampire. Being able to talk directly to players, especially across wide geographical separations, is something we didn’t have 20 years ago when Vampire came into being, and a lot of our decisions were kind of “cowboy” decisions, made based on gut feelings and guesswork rather than with any direct indication that a design decision was the right one. The only real feedback we had to go on was sales numbers, and those lagged so far behind and revealed only such a small portion of the player experience that we were largely developing by trial and error. Now, being able to share a systems or setting draft and integrate feedback is not only possible, but easily done and maintained.

Looking back, how long ago did you started role playing and why? What caught your attention initially?

I’ve always been attracted to the fantastical and fanciful. I remember seeing Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards when I was really young, listening to music that had a unique sound and cool cover art, and indulging imagination. When I was nine, my cousin ran a D&D game in his basement, and that was my first introduction to roleplaying games. Even in my periods of RPG gaming lull after that, I was always engaged in some kind of game, even if it wasn’t a LARP or tabletop RPG. I didn’t even need to be playing directly, just interacting with an imaginary place.

It’s a very different kind of monster being a GameMaster/Storyteller than being a player, how is it that you went from being a player to GM and then to game designer?

I’ve always been attracted to the worldbuilding aspect of game design, so while I was entertaining myself with the worldcraft of character creation, I turned my thinking to a larger scope. Why is this true in a particular world? A lot of that has narrative application, as you’re building webs of motivations for characters or creating cause-and-effect rewards for players to uncover and exploit, but it’s also interesting in a rules and experience context. For example, that’s why Vampire works as a morality story – your power as a vampire comes from an expendable resource, like, say, “mana” or “action points,” but it’s actually blood. You have to take your resource away from someone else and harm them to do it. At what price power? So the thought exercises that came from explaining the why behind the systems really turned my attention to design as a practice.

Do you feel satisfied with your achievements as a game designer? Is there any game, whether in genre or subject, you would like to create or work on but haven’t been able to?

I’m pretty happy with where I am. There’s always more work to do, of course, but I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to steer the direction of a game I love. I wish I had more time to do more playing, more writing, and more conceptual exploration, but that’s a truism of human life, I think. We all want more time. Time is the only resource that means anything, both in gameplay and life.

For example, I’ve been working on Pagan Lands, which is an original-rules fantasy hexcrawl inspired by the weird fiction that started the hobby, as a sort of love letter to why I like to play RPGs. With all of the V20 work that’s been going on plus day job plus a lot of my recent relocation, I haven’t been able to work on it nearly as much as I’d like to. Why not? I NEED MORE TIME, MAN.

Finally, which are your current projects both rpg’s and other stuff?

Right now, I’m working on an as-yet unannounced project at my Red Storm day job that’s pretty exciting, and perfectly in line with my design philosophy. The current Vampire title I’m working on is Children of the Revolution, with Hunters Hunted 2 right around the corner. I’ve got an old-school fantasy game hex crawl shaping up in my tiny bits of free time, and I’ve got a card game that’s ready to play, but that needs some art and graphic design before I can do anything with it. A few more fiction projects (both short- and long-form) have been lying neglected for a while, but I don’t think I’ll make it back to them any time soon with the other projects I have in progress. Everything in its due time.

Thanks a lot for the interview.

My pleasure! Sorry it took so long to get it back to you.

How can people keep up with your projects and contact you?

On Twitter, I’m @jachilli

On Facebook, I’m justin.achilli

Once the V20 schedule stabilizes, I also hope to be blogging more at justinachilli.com. Which, of course, I need to carve out the time to do.

And well, you knew we had to ask: what’s your honest opinion of the Gehenna book? Is it the ending that V: tM needed but not the one that it deserved?

It’s a tough question. I was definitely happy with the Gehenna book, and so were many players. It went to reprint three times! That said, Vampire is an intensely personal game, and I know that it couldn’t possibly conclude everyone’s individual chronicle personally. That’s why we presented the variety of scenarios we did. We had identified the most frequent playstyles and chronicle types that people were using, and then created scenarios specifically suited to those types. That’s the key word, though, “types.” If your type deviated from the most frequent or had some other unique characteristic, we couldn’t possibly have created an infinite book that was all things to everyone.

One of the core principles of storytelling is crafting an end, obviously. All stories have to end. Did Gehenna conclude the “official” Vampire storyline with an appropriate bang or whimper? I think it did. And yet, here we are, talking about Vampire stories that continue long after the end of that particular continuity thread. I think that’s a good sign.

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7 March 2012

The Right to Hack?

I asked on Twitter if gamers had a “right to hack.” The response was somewhat more even than I had expected.

ImageTo be clear, when I say “right to hack,” I’m talking about a player’s ability to get into the nuts and bolts of the game, wether setting or systems, and make changes they felt like making. For the purposes of the conversation, I didn’t care whether we were talking about tabletop games or video games. Call it kitbashing, homebrew, house rules, or actual code manipulation, if you will.

Most of the conversation asserted that it was, in fact, the player’s right to bend systems and setting to taste. In fact, some approached the topic from a “just try to stop me” perspective, indicating that for some, it’s more than a right and nigh upon a duty. Especially from the tabletop RPG angle, I can see this. Groups of tabletop players literally need to make their own mark on their games, because the improvised stories that emerge from them — and indeed, outside the written body of work for these games — are the game’s content itself. A publisher can construct a scenario, but once that scenario is in play, it’s inherently being manipulated toward the player group’s end.

It becomes a bit different in video games. The “right to hack” takes on an almost Oliver Wendell Holmes approach, in which a player’s manipulation of the game systems is allowed to travel as far as where another player’s game experience begins. For instance, if I’m playing a game by myself, I can hack it all I want — I’m changing the experience only for myself and I’m not affecting anyone else. But when I do it in a situation in which other people are involved, I’m not only affecting my game but theirs. If we agree to share that modified environment, that’s fine, but if I’m playing a version of the game that offers me different and not-agreed-upon differences, I’m playing against the spirit of the entertainment.

Most remarkable about all of this talk was the sense of community that the conversation indicated. When hacking tabletop games, the expectation was that the changes made were accepted by and intended to satisfy the players collectively. I’m not hacking my fighter to have an unfair advantage to outperform yours by breaking the rules. My vampire can’t use Mage magic while yours has to use by-the-book Disciplines. Changes that are made affect the players as a whole and, indeed, the gamemaster who’s coordinating the whole affair.

In terms of video games, the “right to hack” may begin with a single player, but eventually grows to encompass and benefit the whole community of players. Now, that’s not really surprising, given that few people want to identify themselves as cheaters, but the very idea of what we being hacked here game a sense that it was being performed in the interests of fair play. Not so much, “I’m going to do this,” but, “Lets’s do this.” For example, the old WoW add-on that showed the spawn locations and best routes for completing quests was initially created by a player seeking to most efficiently level his character, and that player then shared the mod with other players to offer them the same benefit. In fact, Blizzard eventually saw how many people had been using the mod, saw that it had benefit to their players, and rolled it into the “official” game system.

I love this sort of thing. As a game designer, design is really only the beginning of the process. A game is nothing but a box of pieces, a book, or some code until it’s played. The game comes to life when the player brings the spark of activity to the inanimate parts in question. If that design needs to change to accommodate a player or community’s breath of life, that’s not only fine but desirable. The game itself is just a thing. It’s what we do with it together that matters, and if what we do with it changes the nature of the game in order to facilitate that player-to-player interaction, more’s the better. After all, what right should I have to stop it?

In fact, I think there’s a certain responsibility, or at least an enlightened self-interest, for publishers to watch how their games are being hacked and to criticially determine whether those hacks do, in fact, improve the game experience so that they can be integrated into future editions, expansions, patches, or what have you. There’s no playtest so thorough and useful as actual in-play games, and with the ready communication and online, updatable nature of modern games, a designer who wants longevity for his titles would do well to turn today’s best hacks into tomorrow’s core rules.

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22 September 2011

Gameplay: Proactive and Reactive

I have long maintained that Vampire is a proactive game, as opposed to a reactive game. In a reactive game, the GM pits the players against a specific situation. The old man comes to the tavern, gives the PCs a map, and off they go to plumb its depths. In a proactive game, however, the players’ characters have their own goals, and much of the game tale revolves around their seeking to accomplish their agenda. Certainly, there’s room (and some would argue necessity) for a Storyteller to interject defining thematic moments and events, but much of the play is directed by the wiles of the character. It’s reasonable, in Vampire, to say, “The Prince wants to know who strangled his ghouls during the Michaelmas riots? I don’t care. My Brujah union delegate would rather continue undermining the Ventrue power-grab happening at Tammany Hall.”

That’s a great recipe for creativity, especially for those troupes that understand that gameplay is a shared creative experience. When the players and the Storyteller work together to create a compelling chronicle, the results are engaging for both sides of the ST screen.

In practice, though, I’ve observed that sometimes a player needs a bit of a “push” in order to start forming an agenda for her character. Many games tout a wholly open-ended experience. “You can do whatever you want!” seems like a great pitch, but in reality, it often confounds the player with the paradox of choice. If I can really do anything I want, how do I narrow down my options to refine my character concept?

(The other side of the paradox of choice, of course, is the illusion of choice. I still have a dismissive opinion of Aion, for example, because I watched one of their web videos that told me I could do whatever I wanted in the world and then promptly couched my opportunity in the terms of the DPS-Tank-Healer paradigm used by every other MMO. And you can’t change any of the world through your actions, so provided your definition of “do whatever you want!” is do what you can already do in every other game and have none of it result in anything of significance, well, you’re golden.)

Gaining control of an abstracted resource — becoming Prince or Primogen or acquiring Influence in Vampire — is a game objective that becomes more valuable as the context of the game and story develops.

This is where I think the roles of the clans has been one of Vampire’s greatest assets. This past weekend at the Grand Masquerade, my table at the Antediluvian dinner spoke a bit about this very concept. The clans are like social classes: They help define what I’ll be doing in the game, but they’re defined by the Kindred who constitute them, not their role in a gamist party dynamic. They’re families, not occupations. I can play them to type or against type and always use them as a sort of template, but I never have to be defined by the template. They’re character shorthand, and I can play my entire unlife as a clan member in the terms they present, or I can individualize and characterize beyond them if I choose.

Compare this to, say, the first edition of Wraith, which didn’t provide a role or concept for characters to adopt. It did so very broadly: You can belong to the Hierarchy, Renegades, or Heretics, but those are purely social constructs and more setting elements than direct objectives. When Rich Dansky did his revision work for the second edition of Wraith, he turned up the importance of the guilds, which provided a much-needed sense of direction for the players. It helped define what the game was about. It provided and extremely important context and a statement of the game’s essential experience.

Big score is an easily understood reactive model, since the players are in direct competition. Each reacts to the other's degree of success by trying to trump it.

In the transition to video games, this is still a critical piece of gameplay. In many games, it’s absent because the player’s role is wholly defined. You don’t need a guild or clan in Words With Friends, for example, because that’s not what the game’s about. The choice is moot in World of Warcraft, by comparison. Whether Alliance or Horde, you can still be a warlock or rogue and you’re only picking avatar options as a subset of team. WoW defines the gameplay experience by class, however, and likewise doesn’t allow actions to affect the world, which makes the essential experience how you’re killing the monsters, not whether you’re killing the monsters or to what end. WoW and Words with Friends and D&D are reactive — here’s what you’re going to do. Here are your letters or your quest, now hop to it! It’s a directed gameplay in which the essential experience is immediately available to the player, and “figuring out the world” isn’t part of the loop.

When you play Vampire, though, “figuring out the world” is part of the game, as is figuring out how to leave your character’s signature mark on it. It’s a good dovetail of gameplay and setting, since there’s a lot the player doesn’t know at the beginning of a chronicle and horror as a genre thrives on the unknown.

It’s also interesting to note there that the reactive games mentioned above are industry leaders in their comparative segments. By comparison, Vampire has always represented itself as an alternative to the mainstream type of game in its medium — and it maintained an impressive second-place position based on that variant in the essential tabletop roleplaying game experience.

In contrast, casual and social games thrive on reactive designs, because by not forcing the player to make those decisions, they can get directly into the objective-driven play. Play a round, take your turn, have a ten-minute session and you’re done until you choose to return. It’s the play transaction that partially defines the success of the model.

10 comments
9 July 2011

Managing Power of Effect via Parameters

One of the things I’ve been working on recently is powers with multiple parameters. I’ve said before that there’s no such thing in a game as “too powerful” but that the concept instead reflected “doesn’t cost enough of the game resource.” As an expansion of that idea, I’m looking at powers that have multiple parameters defining them.

"I spend one mana point and instantly cause global apocalypse" probably needs some mitigating parameters.

Let’s say you have a power called Touch of Death. To invoke it, you pay X resource and the target dies. Pretty straightforward, right? In most cases, X would be a pretty high number, since the resolution is so simple and severe. Assuming you’re talking about a conflict-resolution game, being able to trump the conflict resolution is a very potent ability.

So, assuming we want to keep the Touch of Death power, how can we make it “not overpowered” in terms of resource expenditure? By applying parameters.

Propagating the power affects the value of X. Look at, for example, the multiplayer aspect of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Everyone effectively has Touch of Death. It’s a single button press. Using it appropriately is the core of game play — kill the other Templars. It costs nothing to perform, but the many other parameters, such as proximity, approach, visibility, and counteraction assume the traditional cost associated with resource expenditure. It “costs” nothing to make an assassination, but I have to manipulate the other events of the game to facilitate the action. Thus time and environment control are the resources.

“Casting time,” whether in the form of cooldown, ramp-up, or some more exotic method can mitigate the resource cost. If Touch of Death takes three seconds to activate, it’s at a disadvantage if used toe-to-toe against a quicker-acting power.

Distance is another frequently employed parameter. Touch of Death implies that I have to touch my target, putting myself in his vicinity and thus exposing myself to capabilities he may have (especially if the implementation times of those other powers are less than that of Touch of Death). My intended target may neutralize me before I’m close enough to employ the Touch of Death.

Any number of other parameters may affect the cost and perceived potency of a power. These may be setting elements, as many tabletop RPGs use (like blood points in Vampire or spell components in fantasy games). They may be mechanical impositions — the rules of board and card games or the interactive systems of video games. It’s not just what a power does that defines it, it’s how the player must interact with the game experience to invoke that power that affects its balance, cost, and significance on play.

Complexities like these are one of the reasons game design is such an iterative and observational discipline. A designer needs to watch and adjust all of these different parameters so they create the experience the game intends to communicate, and that requires both playtest and an eye toward which specific parameter tweak(s) can generate the best results.

4 comments
21 May 2011

Assassino!

Do you like Assassin’s Creed? I like Assassin’s Creed. Huh, look at that. Ubisoft makes Assassin’s Creed.

What’s new with Assassin’s Creed Revelations?

2 comments
13 May 2011

Up and Movin’

So, I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog again, as I do about every year and a half or so. My post frequency has fallen off a bit of late, because I had directed so much attention on working on (and blogging for) the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire. My work there is done now, and Eddy’s taken over the management and development of it. That will maybe let me get back in here and bang around with blogging more than once a week.

It's a prison.

I’ve also left White Wolf/ CCP again and have taken a position with Ubisoft that will be moving my family and I to France. The projects are under heavy NDA, so I can’t talk about them here or even say what they are, but I’m glad to be working on them. (I know, I hate the “Oooh, it’s under NDA” non-remark remark, but I don’t make the rules.)

For a while I was talking about the intersection of tabletop gaming with digital gaming, and I’m sure I’ll continue to have some amount of that sort of outwardly facing contemplation. With the conclusion of my Vampire work, I’m able to turn more attention back to my Pagan Lands setting work, which has received some good feedback over its course. I’ve also got a little darling game project that’s a sort of dinner-murder-mystery about Queen Victoria trying to raise Prince Albert from the dead that may see the light of day. And, of course, fiction writing, for the two or three projects that occupy my hobbyist’s attention in bursts. Maybe some more mixed music sets when I find the time. Probably change the general look of things here.

General RPG consideration, video game consideration, and just plain design talk have always been fun for me, so I’m sure that’ll remain here, too.

I think the biggest change is that this blog might actually become more personal again. Not personal as in things that I don’t want people to see, but personal in that I may end up showing a more holistic approach to games design than I had previously. A designer doesn’t exist in a vacuum: A designer is the sum of the games he plays, the life he lives, and the external influences on him.

I’m about to have a lot of external influences. I’m moving into a different culture, learning a new language, and still being a parent while continuing to design and play games amid it all. At the very least, I hope to have nifty photos of cool European surroundings. Hopefully you remain interested.

20 comments
10 March 2011

Playing When You’re Not Playing

I remember when I first started playing Vampire. In particular, I remember a lot about the times in between the times I first started playing Vampire. I recall plotting the things I was going to do in the next session, jumping at shadows while I did my retail job, spooking myself with the idea that there are vampires out there.

This is the hallmark of a good game. When your player enjoys playing so much that he’s thinking about playing even when he’s not playing, you have a winner. “Playing while you’re not playing” isn’t limited to any particular game form — it applies to RPGs, card games, video games, MMOs, any kind of game you can imagine — and that’s why it’s so valuable.

Pushing that forward a bit, the results magnify when multiple people participate in playing while they’re not playing. The game experience becomes a token, a symbol of what brings people together, and it’s a motivation to do it again.

I talk a lot here about relationships, in particular the relationships between gamers. Playing while you’re not playing is amazing fodder for fostering those relationships. Community thrives in downtime. You don’t have to look any further than forums to see this, or to visit any convention and listen to the conversations that are happening away from the actual tables. Whether people are talking in-character (known by a variety of appellations, such as downtime, soft RP, etc.), discussing the rules and how to manipulate them, or simply talking strategy and content, shared experiences are the basis of relationships. And once those relationships are in place, once you know you enjoy them, you want to go back to them — you want to get back into the game to have more good times, and to share more of those fun experiences with the friends who facilitate them. It’s a positive feedback loop.

It’s separate from worldbuilding. In some ways, wordbuilding is playing while you’re not playing, but it’s generally absent the community or relationship aspect. It’s typically a solo endeavor, more of a tool than an end itself. That’s not to knock it — I’ve made a pretty good career out of some amount of worldbuilding — but it doesn’t satisfy the urge for why people play games. But to expand the exercise even further, add players to that worldbuilding. Give those players something to talk about after the game itself, and you’ve hit a very powerful combination. Fun exercise plus compelling environment equals let’s play again soon.

Understanding why people play games and giving them reasons to do it again are central tenets of game design. More on this soon.

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