Tagged with how players play games …

Jan 08 2012
16 Comments
Actual Play, design, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Preschool Pathfinder

My kid loves games. None too surprising, of course, and when I say that she loves games — she’s three — I really mean that she loves opening the boxes and hammering around with the stuff inside. Unfolding maps, stacking pieces, punching out chits, all the sorts of things that aren’t really playing the game that nonetheless involve or facilitate playing with the game.

Fighting the goblins.

Conceptually, Madeleine certainly understands a lot of things, even if they’re not exactly the rules of a given game. For instance, we recently played Ticket To Ride and she was upset that when my wife played the pieces to claim a route, the color of the trains on the route didn’t match the color of the route itself. Of course, she didn’t know the rules themselves, but she made her own associations among the game components in her mind.

Anyway, I had ordered the Pathfinder Beginner Box because I wanted to take a look at the boxed loot and see firsthand how successful it was as an introductory piece of material. When it arrived, Madeleine, being no stranger to the appearance of games and other boxed goodies, assumed that this was another something for her. She pushed her stepstool over to the kitchen island where I was unboxing the whole thing and jumped right into playing with the pieces. She put together some of the figures on the stands and was already familiar with dice. I don’t know how, exactly, we started actually playing, but when we did, she took right away to the interaction between the players, even though it was only the two of us.

In fact, she liked it so much, she talked about what she had done afterward, and even asked to play again when she woke today and wanted to play again after we got back from the zoo.

The reward for any good dungeon delve is a pile of loot.

Of course, we weren’t playing Pathfinder as its rules define it, but I described a few situations, she told me she wanted to fight the whatevers, and then she rolled the dice. The cause-and-effect sequence took form. Over the course of our play, I observed the following things:

  • I started with the standard exchange of RPG interactions, but then I modified the sequence to fit her interests and attention span. That is, we didn’t really both with AC or movement rates or missed attacks or even hit points, we just rolled dice and knocked over figures. It was the interaction with the pieces and me that held her interest.
  • I varied my tone of voice and the pacing of my descriptions, to which she reacted as cues. She knew that she needed to “hurry up!” while she was fighting, because of the tension of the encounter with the monster. At various points, she jumped up and down, raised her hands in victory cheers, and even placed the new monsters from the observed flow of prior turns. Today, we added background music, but I don’t know if that had any effect on the experience for her.
  • She picked up parlance very quickly, knowing that she was rolling for “damage” and identifying individual monsters. She liked fighting the dragon and the goblins; she didn’t like fighting the spider or the “goop” (ooze).
  • She immediately mapped the relationships of the character types to the prompts for their actions. That is, she knew the fighter fought and the wizard cast spells. After a few turns, when I asked her, “What sort of spell do you want to cast?” I didn’t give her any list or context, and she replied, “Pink.” So I described the wizard’s spell in terms of a pink ray. The next time it came to the wizard’s turn, she replied, “Blue,” “red,” “green,” etc., and every spell effect became shaped like a “ball” that the wizard cast. The fighter always closed to a melee piece placement and the wizard always maintained distance.
  • Importantly, the extrinsic motivator of treasure didn’t supersede the intrinsic motivator of playing the game itself, or at least manipulating the pieces. I placed glass beads at various points on the map and described them as giant diamonds. After she defeated the monster guardians, Madeleine would pick up the character token and the glass bead (as if the character were carrying the treasure) and move them over in front of her. Then she’d move to the next glass bead on the map. At the end of the game, I encouraged her to take the glass beads into her room and keep them as her treasure, where she can see them and count them.

Civilization's victory over the fiendishness of monster-kind.

The result was certainly more toy than game, but the interaction had the key elements of a true game. The only thing missing was meaningful choice, in that there were no real consequences to actions and that Madeleine’s choice for both of her characters was either fighting or casting a spell based on which character we were talking about. Still, she chose which treasure next to pursue and which square on the grid she wanted to occupy to fight the monster, so the rudiments of game play as opposed to toy play were there. Toy play is also consistent to the way her age group participates in expressive activity, so it was encouraging to see that expectation and her formative steps into development beyond those boundaries.

Next time, though, I’m not backing off the TPK.

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Sep 22 2011
10 Comments
design, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

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.

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Jan 20 2011
13 Comments
design, MMOs, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Talking at Flowcharts

Task resolution systems. Oh, good heavens.

When these players' characters talk to an NPC, they're talking to the GM, who can improvise or rationalize a genuine personal response.

In many modern tabletop games, you have a core mechanic that resolves most game situations. Whether combat, occult research, technological repair, or fast-talking the security guards into beliving you’re supposed to be here, there’s a common system to it all. It might be a d20-based system, or perhaps it uses the storytelling rules, or perhaps it’s the One Roll Engine or the Coinematic Unisystem. It might be damned simple or it might have graduating complexity. Combat is probably more specific and complicated than the other situational resolutions. Tabletop RPGs do have their roots in wargames, after all.

Most importantly, though, tabletop roleplaying games have a GM: real, live, thinking (in most cases) rules arbiter and narrative director who can interpret dice rolls, take the role of non-player characters, and improvise situational results.

In most cases, you don’t have that in a video game. You don’t have a guy there who can, through informational relay and creative interpretation, change the results.

In most cases, that’s fine. Most games are designed to do one thing well, so the fact that there is no “hacking” resolution mechanic in Starcraft II doesn’t matter. Lara Croft doesn’t have a portrait-painting minigame. Minecraft isn’t “missing” cryptography.

In most cases, though, the gameplay designed for non-combat contested tasks is just the combat system with anemic set dressing and a whitewash vaguely suggestive of what you wanted to do. The vast majority of computer roleplaying games are designed with combat first and foremost. “Roleplaying” in a computer game context really means “advancement,” not “you take on the persona,” and as such, fighting stuff to level is your primary gameplay.

What if my character wouldn't say any of these? Then all I see is broken immersion and a game that wants me to play it on its terms, not mine.

Fast-talking or seducing an NPC with a social character in a computer RPG is usually just reskinned combat. You’re clicking the social attack button and subtracting that social attack value from whatever social defense value belongs to the NPC. You click your numbers at its numbers and eventually something happens, which is probably a text dump. It’s exactly the combat resolution system, except that combat has all sorts of nifty particle effects and fancy animated maneuvers and yomi-based move-and-countermove. Social interaction challenges maybe have some facial expression changes and your reward is READ THIS, FUCKER.

Combat has open-ended results, but when dealing with a computer-controlled NPC, the social interaction reward is either the linear plotline that you would have been on anyway regardless of your conversation, or it’s an extra handful of clicks through a dialogue tree (which is actually probably a dialogue diamond that’s  going to likewise direct you back into the linear plotline that you would have been on anyway regardless of your conversation).

My big two offenders, largely because of their profile rather than doing it any worse than any other game, are Fallout III and Dragon Age. Both of these are basically combat engines with varying amounts of text piled into the interstices between combats. In Dragon Age, you can have extra cut scenes or dialogue options as a social character, but eventually, you’re going to do that goddamn quest or the game isn’t going to move forward. Fallout III lets you choose a flavor of additional dialogue text, but in no way does its claim that you can make any sort of character you want change the fact that you’re going to be firing that hunting rifle at mutants’ heads way more than you’re going to be Diplomacying the world into revitalization.

These are not “social interactions.” These are more obstacles to click through to get to the big fight at the end that you’re going to have to have anyway. At the best — at the very apex of what they can achieve — they’re lore-delivery vehicles. To paraphrase one of my recent favorite observations, an NPC is just an object you click to get text.

Clicking "mock" on an NPC is not the same as talking to a real person and having an interaction. Also, I'm pretty talented at UI design.

For true “social interaction” or investigation in a video game (to distinguish it from a tabletop RPG with a GM), the gameplay has to be different from the combat engine. If the combat engine requires me to select a target and then spam the hell out of the special attack buttons, then a social interaction engine that requires me to select a target and click the hell out of the “fast talk” and “devastating repartee” buttons is no different from that combat engine.

This guy thought he had a "relationship" with an NPC, and the truth of the matter was more than he could handle.

Further, when you put “social interaction” in a multiplayer game, and all it requires of the player is to click on some predefined sequences with an NPC, the designer is spitting in the player’s eye and insulting his family for three generations, at the very least. Social interactions are for interactions between players, not the limited-output constructs of the game. Whispering filthy innuendo to your PSP isn’t social interaction, either, so stop trying to tell a player that talking to an inanimate object is. This is a simulation of social interaction, just like videogame combat is a simulation of actual physical violence. Capcom doesn’t tell me I’m really engaging in some badass karate maneuvers when I’m playing Street Fighter.

Like I said, good heavens.

 

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Jan 14 2011
1 Comment
design, Interaction, MMOs, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Asynchronicity

Lots of pictures of young women with game peripherals draped over their private parts turn up when you Google Image Search "Adult Gamers." Think about that next time you tell someone you're a gamer and you wish they would take you seriously.

One of the most difficult challenges to hobby gaming is scheduling time to play. The extended time necessary to play most tabletop RPGs — four-hour sessions are the short games — compounds the difficulty.

MMOs have a very distinct edge in this regard. First, their massively multiplayer nature means that, whenever you log on, you’ve (probably) got a vast quantity of other players on at the same time, who are potential co-players in whatever game occupies your attention. There’s no making sure the schedule is clear, finding babysitters, or juggling existing plans because everyone in-game when you log in is already there. Second, most games, whether the vastest of level-grinds, the most expansive of sandboxes, or the briefest of skirmish or challenge scenarios, have digestible amounts of content. “Quests,” upon which many MMOs rely, are basically bite-sized protions of content, designed to be consumed while the player has a finite quantity of time to spend in-game. You can string as many of these together as you want for an extended period of play, but in their simplest form, they’re discrete measurements of play.

(Single-player games do this, too, of course, but since my real enthusiasm is for people playing games together, I’m not going any further down that path.)

Time is the resource in question.

Both of those points, though, have a common element: time. Time is the hurdle facing all players of long-form games. Even this isn’t solved in MMOs. In fact, it’s part of the economic model. The only resource of actual value a game takes from a player is time. In-game currencies can be acquired through play or purchased, but the investment of time a player has to make to play the game is what’s really being “spent.”

So, then, let’s say I have time to spend, but I don’t have it consistently or for long stretches. My solution, then, to play games with other people, becomes doing so asynchronously.

The computer games that have made the greatest breakthroughs and acquired the greatest migrations of players to them in the past three years have been asynchronously played games. Words with Friends. Farmville. Mafia Wars. Puzzle Pirates. In all of these, you drop in, play your piece, and then get back to what you’re doing. Your time in-game might be ten seconds or it might be two hours — but you dictate when and for how long you’re going to play. Whether the game is turn-based or real-time doesn’t matter. The fact that you play on your schedule is what makes them playable. You play them because they’re fun, but also because they’re convenient. Playing them dovetails with your lifestyle, and doesn’t put other things you’re doing on hold.

(It’s not just games that work like this. Lots of modern activities effectively work like “life apps.” Do them in between other things, or do them as low-intensity activities while you’re engaged in something else, whatever makes you happy. Swimming through Wikipedia is one of my favorite life apps.)

So, here’s this amazingly convenient way to play, and with a set of enjoyable systems that take advantage of the play pacing, could have tremendous application… so why haven’t traditional roleplaying games adapted to this model? De Profundis gave it a shot, but it for the most part actively eschewed “digital” play as unevocative of the original Lovecraft source material, favoring post-and-stationery letter-writing.

Asynchronous! Like this... electric spindle motor. Okay, smart guy, you come up with a good illustration for "asynchronous."

Asynchronous roleplay does occur, and is often found in various free-form forums scattered around the internet and somewhat in the MUDs that still operate. These suffer the same drawbacks as other attempts at bringing roleplaying into a digital medium, in that most attempts at campaigns and longevity collapse under pacing concerns, player absence, player disinterest, and the simple fact that they’re constructed to be synchronous (with an implicitly slower pace) rather than asynchronous. Many rely on turns or an egalitarianism of participation, instead of capitalizing on the punch-in, punch-out nature of convenience-driven play. MUDs, given their (potential) size, have the best records of longevity, but they’re not always accessible quickly or for pop-in, pop-out.

I’m reluctant to stand by the blanket statement at this point, but I’ll advance it as a theory: Sandbox or open-ended games seem to work better in this medium than narrative-driven or scripted campaign/ chronicle types, largely because they thrive when players are proactive rather than collectively reactive.

We're going to have to face this problem in shifts, sometimes together, often apart.

I’ve dinked around with the format a little bit. For a while, I ran a play-by-Wave game that was a bit like Ultima Online in its construction, but I made the error of running it at a structured period of time, like a table game only using Wave. It came apart within a few weeks. I’ve run forum games that quickly ground to a halt for the usual reasons. I’ve played-by-email with rapidly declining interest exacerbated by incongruities between my readiness to play and the game’s structure for allowing me.

Agency is one of the key points. Just like gathering around the computer (instead of the table) at a certain time didn’t work, throttling the experience through a GM-type player likewise doesn’t work, as it impedes the asynchronicity. If you check back in and the GM-player hasn’t moderated the last “turn,” well, you’re stuck. That suggests the necessity of each player to change or contribute to the environment via participation, rather than a reaction to another player’s impetus (though reaction to another player’s input is always an option).

You and I, we want to play, but we can’t match a schedule. We want a roleplaying-type campaign, but we also want enough rules so we’re not just improving a text story — we want to be playing, not just generating words or narrative. We want to play for an arbitrary duration, at irregular intervals. How do we accomplish this? And then, once we have the game established, how to we turn it into a business model?

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