The Silmarian Sun

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

The Daily Babbler
by Rona Gabbler

Welcome, Dear Reader! We have something completely different for you today. Far from the golden palaces, magical mansions, and lofty wizard towers of Silmarian society, this time The Daily Babbler takes you to another world!

Nestled in the rolling foot hills at the base of towering snow-crested mountaintops in the land of California, we visited the famous Flying Aardvark Ranch. Here we caught up with the renowned Corey S Cole, Earth chronicler of Gloriana – and especially Silmarian – adventures. It has been over ten years since the Coles related the tale of the Hero’s rise to the throne of Silmaria. Ten years, while their creative talents languished in relative obscurity. But now the talk of the town is about the upcoming launch of Corey and Lori’s mysterious new game project. Here, in this exclusive interview with your intrepid reporter, we reveal some of the secrets.

Rona Gabbler: Mr. Cole, It’s such a thrill for me to finally meet you after all these years. You look just like your photo on the back of the “Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire” box. Except that you’ve shaved off the beard. And lost all your flowing long hair. Oh, and weren’t you wearing glasses back then? At any rate, our readers are just dying to learn the truth to the rumors that you and Lori are creating a brand new game.

Corey Cole: Well, it isn’t exactly new. In fact, we started on it almost two years ago …

RG: You’ve been working on this game for Two years! That must be amazing! I’ll bet you have the most incredible 3D graphics and fight sequences ever! Flying mounts soaring around floating islands in the sky, barely avoiding the attacking roflcopters… Will the players need special 3D glasses to play?

CC: Actually, it isn’t that type of game at all. There’s excitement and adventure, but…

RG: I’ll bet there is! Exploring the dark underbelly of the Silmarian sewers, trying to find the sunken temple where the magical lyre of the Minoan monarchs lies guarded by monstrous Minotaurs and giant, poisonous, man-eating snakes! Ooh, you’re following the lyre’s notes and you have to duplicate those notes in order to open the locked doors…

CC: No snakes or musical notes. This isn’t “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Loom.” This is interactive storytelling. The player is a critical part of the story and will shape how it comes out.

RG: Oh, you mean the player will get to say something really clever like, “All your base is belong to me,” and you’ll set Silmaria in space! It’ll be every story ever told all rolled into one – You’ll get to create your own creatures at the cell level and adapt them to fit their environment, then they’ll have kids and start societies and go out to space and…

CC: You’re thinking of Spore. Will Wright already did that game. No, we’re focusing on one story so we can make it the best we can. And it’s in Silmaria.

RG: I knew it! Silmaria where the sun is always shining and exciting things happen every day! Silmaria, with its soft, sandy beaches and crystal clear waters. Silmaria, where the pirates ravage… Oh, that’s it! You’re making a game about pirates!

CC: That was Secret of Monkey Island. Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer. Ok, Lori and I do like pirate adventures…

RG: Yarrr! Shiver me timbers, matey! Scupper me with a marlin spike….

CC: No! Not a pirate game this time! Maybe later. This game is…

RG: Oooh, I’ll be it’s in the palace! You’ll be a skilled swordsman and get to run through the hallways and jump up and down to avoid traps. If you get through it all, the Hero will declare you the new Prince of Silmaria!

CC: That would be Prince of Persia, and we’re trying to do something very different here. You’ll make friends and solve puzzles; not so much of the swashbuckling. But you will…

RG: Ah! Political suspense! You will rise to meet every challenge. People will look up to you in awe. You’ll promise to save the country from a collapsing economy, and people will flock to your cause!

CC: Um, no, this isn’t about Barack Obama’s election.

RG: Barack who?

CC: Right. Where was I? Oh, going back to school.

RG: You don’t have to do that! You’re already a Hero!

CC: Not me, your character. You get to play one of the students at…

RG: Hogwarts Academy! Ooh, I love J.K. Rowling’s work. She’s just as talented at writing as you are at making games! I can see it now, “Harry Potter and the Sands of Silmaria”!

CC: Um, no, this is about the School for Heroes.

RG: The School for Heroes? I thought that closed down after that little incident with the Meeps and the Thieves’ Guild. They just about ran the Famous Adventurer out of town on a rail.

CC: Oh, well, he got better. The school is open again and better than ever. Well, except maybe for the Rogues. But you get to play a young Wizard…

RG: See? See?! I told you it was going to be Harry Potter! I knew it! When Harry dropped out of Hogswarts, he…

CC: It’s nothing like Harry Potter! All right, so it is about a Wizard at a school with a mysterious past. But other than that…

RG: Mysterious past? Kind of like Katrina and the Dark Master and biting people? Scary! I can see it – You play a Vampire’s child, trying not to reveal that you are bloodthirsty monster. Fortunately, the only thing that gives you away is the pointy canine teeth, your overpowering reaction to the sight of blood, and the fact that you sparkle in the sunlight…

CC: No! It’s NOT about Vampires. But you do have a secret …

RG: A Secret! What is it? We love secrets! Our readers are dying to know what it is that we need to not reveal to anyone else, cross our hearts and hope to cry. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone about this. We’re all very good at keeping them. Why, I write about secrets all the time!”

CC: MUST… NOT…. KILL…. GNOME….

RG: Unfortunately, our interview came to an end as Corey apparently had some sort of an asthma attack and had to be restrained, poor dear. But we can now confirm that the rumors are true. The Coles are creating a very exciting new game set here in our own sunny Silmaria. We look forward to hearing more about this great event.

There you have it. Another brilliant interview with your Gnome for news. Toodles!
- Rona Gabbler

Tags: Game Design, Humor
Posted in Humor | 4 Comments »

Egg-Centricities

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

This Sunday is Easter, a time of symbols and traditions. It’s Springtime, and Easter represents hope, new life, fertility, and rebirth. Kids get a few days off school, and families get together to feast and celebrate the joy of life.

As far as children are concerned, the most important traditions of Easter involve chocolate, candy, and a bright pink or yellow Easter Bunny. People decorate colorful hard-boiled eggs which are then hidden about the house and yard by the Easter Bunny (cunningly impersonated by game-loving parents). On Easter Day, the kids scurry around trying to find and collect the eggs. A few eggs were usually hidden too cleverly. The real surprise came from finding these hidden eggs the following Easter. So these days most wise parents substitute hollow plastic eggs with a few jelly beans or chocolate coins inside. Easter is obviously sponsored by the dental industry.

Un-Egg-Spected Surprises

Game Developers like to hide Easter Eggs, too, but they do it in their games. An Easter Egg is a hidden character, place, or event in a game that seems a little odd, hopefully in a humorous way. They can be references to pop culture, history, other games, etc. Sometimes they open additional game play (“secret levels”), but more often they are just there as a reward for observant players.

While Easter Eggs can be distracting, they actually have an important role in improving the quality of a game. I like to describe the “intensity graph” of a game as looking like a roller coaster. The action and intensity build to a peak, then drop down to a more relaxed level before starting to build again. The “low points” of intensity provide contrast for the high points. Without them, a game becomes stressful and less fun. Also, the highs seem higher when there are lows against which to contrast them. An all-action game or movie will not feel as intense as one that gives players/viewers a chance to relax a little between the action scenes. Easter Eggs provide that lull in the action.

Egging on the Clowns

Quest for Glory featured many Easter Eggs, including “mirages” in the desert such as the Persian Golfer (a reference to the Persian Gulf War), the Awful Waffle Walker, and a submarine that showed up in the lake near Spielburg. We also had cameo appearances by such luminaries as the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and “Sanford and Son.”

During the development of Trial by Fire, Brian Hughes mentioned that our menu system reminded him of the menus in productivity software such as VisiCalc (one of the early spreadsheet programs). These programs often contained disabled menu items intended for future enhancements, and he suggested that we could have a menu item that did absolutely nothing. Thus was born the “Silly Clowns” menu, originally a feature that had no game effect whatsoever.

We may have lost some of the purity of the idea, but probably made it more fun, when we decided that we could actually do something with a “Silly Clowns” mode. In the production version of Trial By Fire, Harpo Marx only makes his cameo appearance in the alleys of Shapeir when Silly Clowns is active. Some of the death messages have sillier versions too. Since these are totally useless changes, they keep the spirit of the useless menu option.

Brian was also responsible for the “Saurus Repair Shop” Easter Egg in Trial by Fire. This scene had to be cut from the original release because we ran out of disk space. However, AGDI contacted Brian and recreated it for their recent VGA version of the game. Saurus maintenance – not for the faint of heart.

One of the Sierra artists, Jerry Moore, was famous for slipping a Star Trek reference into every game on which he worked. For example, there is a miniature Starship Enterprise on the shelf of the magic shop in Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire. Jerry also added the Maltese Falcon statuette to the treasure room at the end of Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero.

At the time, this was purely an Easter Egg, but Lori decided it would make an interesting plot point for the rest of the series. We put a “black bird” in each game and added a Thief story thread inspired by the movie, “The Maltese Falcon”. It started as an Easter Egg and became a MacGuffin (a plot point object).

Easter Eggs of Azeroth

World of Warcraft is full of Easter Eggs. “Critters” in WoW are small level 1-3 animals that are just there for atmosphere. While wandering through the Grizzly Peaks, I came across an odd group of critters. They were in a group consisting of a deer named “Mother of Bambina”, a small fawn named Bambina, a rabbit named Thudder, and a skunk named Flower. The names are variations on characters from Disney animated films, and the reference could have stopped there, but…

Suddenly I heard a gunshot and saw Mother of Bambina fall. Off to the side appeared a dwarven hunter; I could imagine his gun still smoking. Bambina called out, “NOOOOOO! Mother, we will avenge you!” Then he ran to the hunter and stomped him flat in a single attack, after which the rest of the party wandered off. It’s amazing what a level 1 critter can do to a level 75 hunter, given enough incentive and adrenaline.

There are dozens, hundreds – maybe thousands – of other pop culture references in World of Warcraft including an entire quest chain with character and object names from The Legend of Zelda video game series.

World of Warcraft also has the traditional type of “Easter Egg”. Every year at Easter time (but running late this year), WoW features the Noble Garden festival, which includes having Easter Eggs hidden throughout Azeroth. Inside each egg is a small prize – a few coins, or sometimes a lovely Spring dress. The latter are rare and much sought-after by role-playing ladies and completists. Lori spent most of our first WoW Easter searching for eggs and slaying bandits with her Paladin in Westfall.

Speaking of eggs in Westfall, Alliance players can tame a chicken in Westfall by repeatedly doing a Chicken Dance around it. If they are willing to make themselves look completely ridiculous, they can earn the small reward of a special pet.

Egg-Qual Time

There are of course Easter Eggs in many other games besides World of Warcraft and Quest for Glory. We just don’t play very many of them these days. Feel free to comment on this article with some of your favorite Easter Eggs from other games. Here are a few from older games:

Some Sierra games were best known for the many ways the character could die. LucasArt’s Ron Gilbert thought that character death was bad storytelling, so the player character could not die in The Secret of Monkey Island. Except when he falls off a cliff, and a Sierra-style death message pops up: “Oh, no! You’ve really screwed up this time! Guess you’ll have to start over! Hope you saved the game!” A few seconds later, the box disappears and Guybrush bounces back up onto the ledge. He looks towards the camera and explains, “Rubber tree.”

In Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the main villains are Trebor and Werdna. Try reading those names backwards, knowing that the game authors were Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg.

During development of King’s Quest IV, someone substituted a picture of Roberta Williams topless in a hot tub on the death message screen. The original image came from the cover of Leisure Suit Larry, but was touched up to “add a couple details”. That image lasted almost until the final version, but Roberta made them take it out shortly before the game shipped. Alas.

Diablo is famous for the “Secret Cow Level”. Fan rumors suggested that the original game had such a level, so Blizzard actually added one in Diablo II. You have to play through the entire game, then take a couple of special actions in town, to unlock a game level populated entirely by very aggressive cattle.

Have an Egg-Ceptional Easter!

This Easter, hide some fun for your young (or not-so-young) friends and share some Easter Gaming Goodness. And maybe you can help us find some of those lost eggs from earlier Easters.

So, What Easter Eggs have you found in computer games? We look forward to reading about your favorite game – and real life – Easter egg experiences in the comments.

Tags: Game Design, Humor, Quest for Glory, World of Warcraft
Posted in Humor | No Comments »

Funny Business

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

“Why so SERIOUS?” – The Joker, The Dark Knight

Humor is a very serious business. I say that because I’m not very good at it, yet somehow managed to make a living at it for several years. Quest for Glory is known as a “humorous adventure game” series and we worked hard at keeping it that way. As frustrating as adventure games can be, we decided that it was better to have people laugh with us than scream at us.

Humor isn’t just for “funny” games and stories. Quest for Glory has a serious plot – the inexperienced Hero overcoming all odds to save the world. But along the way, there are many humorous moments and occasional outright silliness. Those moments lighten the mood, making the next dramatic bit all the more powerful.

So, how do you make a pun fun? We’ll show you how it’s done.

Running Gags

The idea of a running gag is to have a short joke that keeps showing up in different contexts. Ideally, it gets a little crazier each time and ends in a “payoff” punch line. Warner Brothers cartoons were famous for this. Airplane had a character say, “I guess I picked a bad time to give up smoking.” Not at all funny by itself, but by the time they got to “… a bad time to stop sniffing glue,” “… a bad time to start guiding space shuttles,” and so on, the accumulated ridiculousness became hilarious.

We didn’t have too many running jokes in Quest for Glory, but there was a walking one – the Awful Waffle Walker of Tarna. Marc Hudgins, a QG3 animator (and later lead artist on QG4), animated a walking waffle just for fun. He showed it to us and we ended up integrating it into the game. You kill it, you eat it.

The one-upmanship of Erasmus and Fenris might count as a running gag – Erasmus would start to tell a joke, Fenris would top it, Erasmus would try to recover, and Fenris would end with a zinger. It was enough to make anyone gag.

Ridiculous References

Quest for Glory got a lot of mileage out of anachronistic references to other sources. We used the Marx Brothers in QG2, Young Frankenstein in QG4, and dozens of other pop culture references. At one point Erasmus tells the Hero, “I can say no more,” and Fenris responds, “Please say no more.” That’s from the Beatles movie, “Hard Day’s Night.”

How abstruse were the in-jokes? I think we can safely say that nobody got all of them. Looking back at the Hero Magazine included with QG4, we had an article called, The Hero as an Artform by Fish Crawdad, “Ze Greatest Hero in Ze World” That’s a reference to Chris Crawford, who used to (jokingly, we think) call himself, “ze greatest game designer in ze world.” Chris, in turn, used “ze” to make fun of the fake French accents beloved by self-appointed “auteurs” in the film industry. Or how about the “Elderbury Pie” you bring Baba Yaga in QG4? Did you know that “Erna’s Elderberry House” is the fanciest restaurant in Oakhurst? I didn’t think so.

Other references in that magazine (and QG4) include “October Derleth” (August Derleth), “H.P. Craftlove” (H.P. Lovecraft), the mad monk Amon Tillado (“The Cask of Amontillado”, by Edgar Allen Poe), “Carl Atlas” (Charles Atlas, the body builder, who used to advertise on the back cover of comic books), and “Mister Mannerly” (Miss Manners, the newspaper advice columnist).

Monty Python was a favorite source – for example, the Dead Parrot Inn is only funny if you’ve seen their dead parrot sketch. Vorpal bunnies were feared monsters in QG4. To get to Erasmus’s house in QG1, you first had to get by a gargoyle who asks you “Questions Three.”

There were even references to other Sierra games. Every Quest for Glory features a moose head somewhere. This was a long-standing Sierra tradition used in King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and other games. In Mordavia, the moose has fangs.

Certain Sounds are Silly

An aardvark and an emu check into a hotel in Azusa. Whatever happens to them, we know it’s going to be funny. Quest for Glory 1 featured the Antwerp, one of the strangest monsters in gamedom. Basically they just bounced up and down, but it they landed on you, it was crushing. If you hit one with a dagger, it split into multiple baby Antwerps.

It could have been worse. We could have set the entire game in Cucamonga.

Rhyme and Pun-ishment

“Doctor, my funny bone hurts.” “Well, it’s clear… You need an a-pun-dectomy!”

It’s been said that the pun is the lowest form of humor. They say that as though it’s a bad thing. But we need high humor and low. Most puns (excepting certain shaggy dog stories and Feghoots) have the virtue of being over very quickly. A pun can be fun if you tell it and run.

A pun is really just a specialized form of word play. Other forms can be excessive alliteration, using alternate meanings of words, having a character use language you wouldn’t expect, and many others.

The Gnomes in Quest for Glory are known for their sense of humor – and particularly their puns. In the first game, you eventually learn that dark wizard of the brigands is actually Yorick, a gnome jester who makes you cross a crazy room in order to talk to him.

In Shapeir, when you first go into the magic shop, you are greeted with, “Welcome to my little shop of wonders. Wonder what shop this is? It’s magic of course. I am Keapon Laffin, proprietor. You must be Nobil Caws. Proud to know you Mister Caws.” He spoke in riddles and rhyme all of the time. He was obviously a pun-dit of pun-demonium.

In Shadows of Darkness, you meet the Gnome comedian, Punny Bones. This unfunny Gnome can’t tell a joke from a straight line since the time he told the joke so bad that it made Baba Yaga curse. You get to help poor Punny regain his punchlines by bringing him a Good Humor Bar in QG4. Yes, we raised the bar for humor there.

And a Gnome named Anne runs the “Gnome Anne’s Land” Inn in Silmaria in QG5. Her food is world renowned – The lobsters there are so fresh, you have to slap their faces. And salad dressing? Her tomatoes wear tuxedos and her lettuce wears lace.

Some of the most effective puns are accidental. Just remember – When no pun intended, then no pun ish meant.

The Funny Pictures

We love comics because a good illustration can often make something funnier than mere words. Frank and Ernest is a personal favorite. The characters and settings are so wacky, the words just seem funnier. Besides, Bob Thaves comes up with a lot of fun puns.

The original EGA Hero’s Quest used a very cartoony style – How realistic can you get in 320×200, 16-color graphics anyway? That set the tone for the game. The entire “bouncing Antwerp” bit came from a Jeff Crowe illustration. Similarly, the cartoony appearance of Erasmus and Fenris in the first game goes right along with their bantering dialogue.

The detailed room backgrounds were filled with knick-knacks and in-jokes. At Keapon’s magic shop, you will see stuffed antwerps, the Starship Enterprise, and x-ray goggles. The goggles were ‘a veil-able’ when you needed them.

And then there were the opening cartoons… The first game opens with the Hero chasing after a small Saurus, then running away from a much larger Saurus. In the second game, your flying carpet almost gets hit by the Starship Enterprise.

Seek Serious Silliness

Did you know that April is National Humor Month in the U.S.? That gives us license to carry a pun. That’s an awesome responsibility! Have you told a bloke a joke today? Made a llama laugh or a gorilla giggle? If not you – then zoo?

With the Glory days behind us, it’s once again time for us all to light the lantern of laughter and kindle the candle of kookiness. We must seek out new lines and new pun-tifications. We’ll boldly joke where Gnome Anne has punned before.

Punny Bones, Fenrus, and Erasmus’s images were from QG4, created originally by Tim Loucks.

Tags: Game Design, Humor, Quest for Glory
Posted in Humor | 6 Comments »

The Power of the Tower

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Gather around the fire, my friends, and I shall tell you the tale of the Tower. It is the story of an innocent young man who was seduced by the siren song of the Goddess of Gaming. Risking the scorn of his players, and the acid words of the critics, he dipped his pen into the murky inkwell of Creation to create his own adventure. Yes, this is the story of how I came to write my first dungeon module, The Tower of Indomitable Circumstance, and how it changed my life.

Slay Them All!

I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in the late 1970’s while working on a computer project in Chicago. Jack Eilrich was the main DM, and ran a “killer game”, with the average life expectancy of a character maybe 3-4 sessions. Jack’s games were full of imagination, excitement, and challenge. We even managed to get in some role-playing, especially during the frequent roll-up-a-character process. One night, I rolled up three consecutive characters within an hour as two of them died before becoming old enough to quest.

Sitting in my hotel room one night, I decided to give DM’ing a try and put together my first full dungeon module. It was a beginning adventure set in a remote tower filled with puzzles and mystery. When I ran our usual group through the scenario, the players made very favorable comments on it. Of course, that might have just been because I didn’t kill any of their characters.

The Tower of What?

The original scenario consisted of the ground floor and the tower rooms and sprang from my head in a single sleepless night. Filling out the details, adding the underground area, and coming up with a title for publication took 5 more months.

I don’t quite remember how I came up with the title, “Tower of Indomitable Circumstance.” Probably it was something that just popped into my head, so I figured I’d use it as a working title until I came up with something better. Eventually I reworked part of the module so that the title made sense… sort of. (In case you didn’t know, “indomitable” means something similar to “indefatigable”.)

Lesson #1: Working titles take on a life of their own. When you try to change them, they fight back. It’s better to get it right the first time.

DM’s Get All the Girls

Since I preferred playing games to working for a living, I decided to turn Tower into a formal game module and become a professional game writer. I submitted it to Judges Guild, the major 3rd party D&D module publisher at the time, and waited.

At this point I was playing or running D&D games about 20 hours a week, as well as working full-time. I was too busy gaming to write any other modules, so my career as a writer began to look doubtful. I did have one major success with Tower, running it at the 1979 WesterCon in San Francisco for a group that included a lovely young lady named Lori. She was sufficiently charmed by my D&D game as to miss some of my other shortcomings. Yes, it’s true – DM’s get all the girls!

Several months later, when I called Judges Guild to ask if they were going to publish my module, they asked, “Oh, you were submitting that for publication? We’ve been playing it for the last few weeks in our in-house campaign. We love it!” Next thing I knew, I had a contract, and in 1981 Tower finally saw print.

Lesson #2: Publishers have a long turn-around time. If you want to make a living as any sort of writer, you need to keep writing while you’re waiting to hear about your first submissions.

Building the Tower

As a D&D player with no dungeon master experience, how did I start writing a module? Obviously I was influenced by the games in which I played. I had also played Adventure and Zork at this point, and had some experience with a real-life quasi-religious cult. Looking back at Tower of Indomitable Circumstance, it has a lot more detail and puzzles than most of the role-playing modules I’ve seen.

Tower was designed to be an interesting adventure for beginning characters, so I based it on problem-solving by the players rather than on their characters’ abilities. I tried to give Tower the flavor of “something interesting in every room”, rather than having a lot of generic rooms full of inappropriate monsters. Many of the rooms of Tower have “On Closer Examination” sections to reward players for actively doing and examining things.

I also wanted a consistent setting. Many early dungeons seemed to be a random collection of traps and monsters. I wanted a “real” place, where everything had a purpose and fit in with the theme of the location and the adventure. For Tower, I accomplished this by creating a tower that was originally designed as an initiation tests for acolytes who aspired to become Priests of Math (the Celtic God of Magic). As a result, the tower is both a series of tests and of instruction in knowledge a Priest should have.

For example, two adjacent rooms have mirrors, one of which shows the viewers as extremely beautiful, the other of which makes them look incredibly ugly. Once the players have looked in both mirrors, a voice intones, “For after all, both beauty and ugliness are ethereal in nature, and the Wizard has both at his command.”

Lesson #3: If you start with an interesting theme, then keep the rest of your writing consistent with it, you will find it much easier to write something fun.

Posing a Passable Puzzle

I have a confession to make. I pretty much suck at “solving” adventure games. I come across a puzzle and say, “Huh? How am I supposed to figure that one out?” It could just be me, but I don’t think so. I think that most puzzle creators try to “beat” the players by coming up with puzzles they won’t be able to solve.

I look at puzzles a different way. I think the purpose of a game designer is to challenge players in a fun way. That means you want them to solve your puzzles – after some thought – not get frustrated by them. I also try to create puzzles that are closely related to the setting and the story. This helps give players the context they need to solve the game.

To create the puzzles in Tower of Indomitable Circumstance, I started out – as I still do today – with a character who has a problem. The demigod Math has seen his temples destroyed and followers persecuted because people distrust magic. He wants students and worshippers, but he can’t just advertise for them. So he creates a challenge that will let qualified adventurers test themselves and learn the principles of his “religion” before making a choice.

Tower introduced a few innovations, such as the then-radical idea that a Priest should actually have a religion. It was also a strongly puzzle-oriented scenario as compared to the mostly hack-and-slash nature of most D&D adventures. Finally, Tower was designed to solve a specific problem – Getting new characters started without killing them off on the way to the dungeon. Our wilderness encounter charts in those days were completely random, so beginning adventurers were as likely to be eaten by Dragons as to fight Kobolds.

Lesson #4: Don’t create puzzles only you can solve. A strong setting will tell you where the puzzles and decisions need to be made.

Belay Those Birkenstocks!

Not all of my puzzles were winners. One of the first ones in Tower involves trying to open a locked door. Near the door is a Japanese-style stand with several pairs of sandals. The players are supposed to figure out that this is a temple, and the priests do not want it soiled, so they should take off their boots and put on sandals before attempting to open the door. I’m not sure any group for which I ran the game actually solved this one. In one case, I noticed on a character sheet that the mage was wearing sandals, so he was able to simply open the door and walk through. It took the rest of the party about an hour.

What happened there? I knew the solution before I posed the problem, but the players could only work with the information I gave them. I needed to add more clues so that the players could “see” the room as I saw it in my mind. “Muddy footprints lead up to the chest, where you find an old pair of boots and several clean pairs of sandals. The area between the chest and the door looks totally clean.” You don’t have to hit the players over the head with this sort of thing, but additional hints can be essential if they’re obviously stuck.

Lesson #5: Shoes Wisely! Don’t assume your players can read your mind.

Turning Points

So there you have it. One lonely night in Chicago, a muse caused me to try something new, and my life changed as a result. Because I wrote Tower, I met my wife. Because I had a published RPG module, Sierra hired us to create Quest for Glory. If my life had gone a different way, I’d probably be a retired, ex-programmer spending my evenings playing World of Warcraft. (Not everything has to change in an alternate future story.)

Lesson #6: Some decisions are more important than others. Some are turning points that alter everything that happens afterwards. These are the most interesting places for puzzles in games, and they’re also the most interesting and meaningful moments in the game of life.

[If you're interested in trying out my first role-playing module, Tower of Indomitable Circumstance has long been out of print, but (being unable to find my own copy) I was able to download a very readable can of the module from RPG Now for $3.00. If you decide to play it, let me know what you think and how well it converts to modern RPG systems and the 21st Century.]

Tags: Corey Cole, D&D, Game Design, Life Advice
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Random Acts – The Drunkard’s Walk

Friday, December 19th, 2008

I (Corey) just read a fascinating book called, “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives,” by Leonard Mlodinow. Since I found myself quoting all sorts of interesting tidbits from the book to Lori, I guess it’s time for another book review – what “The Drunkard’s Walk” is all about and how it relates to games and life.

A “drunkard’s walk,” also known as a “random walk,” is a mathematical term for randomness. Suppose you take one step in a random direction, turn in a random direction, take another step, and so on? Will you end up at your starting point? It’s possible, but it’s far more likely you’ll end up somewhere else. If you flip a balanced coin and it comes up Heads, the next flip is equally likely to come up Heads or Tails. Over the long run, you’ll probably get about half of each, but you can expect to see a lot of “clusters” of 3, 4, 5, or more Tails in a row. That’s why you can’t just pick the best team in a sport and expect them to win every time. There are so many random factors to any significant event that you can never be sure of the outcome until it happens.

There are a lot of counter-intuitive results in probability. Perhaps you’re familiar with the “Let’s Make a Deal” puzzle from the old television game show. Your host, Monty Hall, shows you three doors. Behind one is a brand-new Mercedes, while the other two have live donkeys. After you choose one of these doors, Monty opens one of the remaining two and shows you that there’s a donkey behind it. He then offers you the choice to stick with your original door or switch to the last one. So, what IS behind Door number One? Should you switch? Does it make a difference?

What do you think?

What Are the Odds?

“The Drunkard’s Walk” has some crossover with the previously-reviewed book, “The Black Swan.” One of the important points is that there’s a huge difference between “unlikely” and “impossible.” Over enough trials, every unlikely result is likely to occur. And in a single trial, anything can happen. If you roll two dice together, the most likely result is that they will total 7, but that only happens 1/6 of the time. It is twice as likely that you will roll one of the “unlikely” results of 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, or 12, because their combined chance is 1/3.

That’s really what the Black Swan theory is about – When you look at enough highly unlikely possibilities, the combined chance that at least one of them will happen is actually very high. Of course it’s impossible to predict which unlikely chance will come up – except as a random guess – but unlikely things occur all the time. A friend is fond of saying, “All that probability shows is how unlikely it was for the thing that just happened to occur.”

You’re probably all familiar with the “bell curve” – also known as a “normal distribution”. Basically, “average” and near-average results are the most common, while very low and very high results are rarer. The problem is that our minds are not wired very well for understanding randomness. As a result, we tend to overemphasize the high probabilities and underestimate the lower ones. If we roll two dice, if we expect them to total 6, 7, or 8, we’ll be right a lot, but still wrong more than half the time. If we note that the stock market has historically risen 8-10% per year, we may find ourselves expecting our stock holdings to go up 9% next year… but as we’ve seen, the fluctuations that make up that total trend can be huge, and there’s no guarantee the trend will continue. The outliers – strings of low-probability random results – actually happen quite a lot and can make life very interesting.

Patterns in Chaos

Our brains are programmed to look for and recognize patterns. This is a valuable survival trait, but has the unfortunate side-effect that we tend to see patterns where there are none. We tend to think that a heavily-downloaded song must be good. It might be, but it’s just as likely that it got a few extra downloads early from fans or random chance, then after that benefited from the snowball effect of others assuming that its early success was meaningful.

A related phenomenon is the “confirmation fallacy,” which basically says that we see what we expected to see. Sneaky researchers did a blind taste test of cola brands. First they asked the 30 participants which they preferred – Pepsi or Coke. They then tasted both colas, and 21 out of 30 found they liked the brand they had said they preferred. However, the researchers had switched the bottles, putting Coke in the Pepsi bottle and vice versa. In another test, researchers put the same wine into five bottles with price tags ranging from $10 to $90. The $90 bottle got much higher ratings than the $10 bottle. We tend to believe “authority”, in this case, that the $90 wine must be better for them to be able to charge that much.

Are you concerned that you got a “B” on an important essay test when you thought you should get an “A”? That’s just another example of randomness. In one study, a group of eight faculty members independently graded 120 term papers on the A-F scale. In some cases, their grades differed by two full marks. The average range was one full grade. I remember a friend in High School getting marked down for misspelling “Trinity” in the title of his short story, “A Threnody for Reason.” The teacher didn’t bother to look up “threnody” – a funeral dirge – which was in fact a perfect title for the story. Or the college writing instructor who thought that Lori made up the word, “Ragnarok” on a poem… Teachers, just can’t trust ‘em… er… except for the ones at Our School!

Randomness happens… but how we react to it affects how we live our lives. We think that Bill Gates must be much smarter than other software entrepreneurs because Microsoft has been so successful. And yet, the story of Microsoft points to a huge series of lucky incidents that resulted in that success. Any of a number of less-successful entrepreneurs could be just as smart, and run their businesses just as well, but got fewer “heads” in a row on the coin flips of fate. Sports team managers and executives are judged on the success of their team/company, but pretty much all the winning streaks and team records follow normal distribution patterns. They match random results much better than anything predictive based on management. “The Drunkard’s Walk” has dozens of similar examples of events which are best explained by randomness, but which we tend to think of as having a deeper pattern and meaning.

Make Your Best Deal

Did you answer, “It doesn’t matter,” to the Let’s Make a Deal puzzle? Most people do. In fact, when Marilyn vos Savant said in her syndicated newspaper column that you should switch, she received a lot of angry letters from pretty intelligent people. However, she was correct. Look at the problem this way – You started with a 1/3 chance of picking the correct door. There was a 2/3 chance that the car was behind one of the other doors. Now Monty – who knows which door hides the car – eliminates a door. Your door still has a 1/3 chance of being correct, and the other two doors still have a 2/3 chance. But now there’s only one door to switch to, so the 2/3 chance applies to it alone. Switching gives you twice the chance of driving home in a new car as staying with your original pick. Results on the show confirm this – People who chose a door and stayed with it won the big prize about 1 time in 3. People who switched won 2 times in 3 – double the odds of staying with your original pick.

You can see this more clearly by saying there were 100 doors at the beginning. After you pick one, the host opens 98 of the remaining 99 doors to show they’re empty (or filled with donkeys). There’s a 99/100 chance that the prize is behind the last door, vs. the 1/100 chance that you picked correctly originally. Even if you think there’s a good chance your host is trying to cheat you, you should switch. After all, isn’t it almost as likely that he’s trying to use reverse-psychology on you by trying to keep you from switching?

We all tend to be stubborn about choices. Once we make one, we hate to switch. But when the original decision is purely random, and there is any evidence at all in favor of switching, it pays to be flexible.

Getting Superior Results in a Random World

Are you depressed at the idea that so much of what happens in our lives is random? You shouldn’t be. The important message I took away from “The Drunkard’s Walk” was that we can make randomness work to our advantage. Failures happen, but people who refuse to give up after a setback are the ones most likely to find eventual success. If you “win on a 6″, keep rolling the dice. Sooner or later, you’re likely to hit. If you give up after the first roll, you’re out of the game.

Most of us have had the unpleasant experience of being turned down for a job. Writers and salespeople face constant rejection; one writer papered his cabin with rejection slips. The successful ones are those who keep going and try again. My father has been a successful real estate investor. He once told me that the important thing was never to fall in love with a property. He would make an offer far below the asking price, and if it was rejected, move on to the next property. The first Harry Potter book was rejected nine times before J. K. Rowling found a publisher and became the wealthiest writer in the world. The winners in the game of life are those who keep going and keep trying.

“Never give up; never surrender. Full speed ahead!” Most success comes from trying and failing and trying and failing and yet, trying again. Keep trying and the random factors will eventually align (probably!). Make the odds work in your favor! If you never give up, you’ll never fail.

Tags: Book Review, Game Design
Posted in Books, Game Design | 4 Comments »

Counter-Productivity – How Not to Finish a Project

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

“Writer’s Block” is an ancient curse of writers in every medium and genre. You have a deadline and something you want to write, but somehow the words just won’t come. Well, writer’s block isn’t just for writers anymore. Now anyone in any profession can find ways to zone out, get distracted, and avoid doing useful work. Here are a few of my favorites.

www2 – Wasting aWay on the Web (Win With Wikipedia)

Research! You can never do too much research. And there’s so much information to be had on the Web. Here’s how “research for procrastinators” works. I used to do this with the New Columbia Encyclopedia; now Wikipedia lets you do the same job even better. First, you think of a topic that might be related to what you’re writing, then do a Wikipedia search. You find lots of information and citations, and more importantly many details that don’t at first seem relevant, but do seem Highly Interesting. That of course mandates that you look up each of the related topics in turn. Sometimes a key word will just pop into your head, so you need to look that up as well. Hours later, you might or might not have completed the original research, but your head will be filled with Fascinating Facts you can share with your Friends.

Of course, Wikipedia is but the beginning. There’s a whole World Wide Web full of wondrous and worthwhile wisdom out there. One must keep up with the latest news – There could be inspiration in any of those stories about Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin. Or about Britney. Or the baseball playoffs. Then there are the blogs – Everyone has an opinion, and some of them are Really Inspirational. Web comics – After all, humor is very important to writing and gaming. Besides, some of them – such as Penny Arcade, GU Comics, and Ctrl+Alt+Delete – are Really Relevant Resources on trends in the gaming industry. Oh, and while you’re at it, check out Looking for Group, because you never know when an orphanage might attack you.

What did people do before Google and Wikipedia? Why, they read books and magazines. Fortunately, you can still do that. Amazon.com has several million books. Several of them are undoubtedly of interest, or maybe even useful, to your work. Why not spend some time browsing their catalog and reading user reviews of a few thousand books. Once you find a few that are clearly critical to your research, go ahead and order them. Of course, there’s no sense working on your project until the books arrive and you have a chance to study them.

ggg2 – Good Going, Got a Game, Got to Go

Well, since we’re best known as game designers, and this is nominally a blog about games, it’s clearly essential that we do even more research… by playing games. Now the small-minded might think this purpose best served by spending a short time each with a lot of different games of varying types. But we know that the only way to truly understand the strengths and limitations of a game is by playing each game thoroughly for endless hours. After all, World of Warcraft is really designed around all the players reaching the maximum level and attempting the raid dungeons over and over. Can anyone who hasn’t wiped on Nightbane or Lady Vashj or Archimonde repeatedly truly be said to have experienced all WoW has to offer? We think not. It is, of course, purely a coincidence that we keep researching the same games and that those just happen to be our favorites.

Corey pursues his valuable continuing game research in bridge, Travian, and World of Warcraft. Those are good for about 10-15 hours a day, so who has time for new games?

Oh, then there’s online poker. How ya gonna get rich if you don’t play? Online poker is great, because you can play it at home, at the office, or in the middle of a meeting with clients. They surely want to hear your bad beat stories! Discipline is very important in poker. You need to fold lots of hands. How better to ensure that than to play while you’re in the middle of doing something else?

Eat, Drink, and Procrastinate for Tomorrow We Diet

There is an ancient saying – “Life is uncertain, so eat dessert first.” Well, maybe not quite so ancient, but the thought has undoubtedly been there since before recorded history. Having thought of the line, I of course had to Google it; two sites attribute it to Ernestine Ulmer, American writer, in 1925. Anyway, having run out of ideas for this blog, I of course ran to the refrigerator. A pear, a chunk of cheddar cheese, and a bowl of Peace Cereal’s “Mango Passion” later, inspiration smote me and this section was born. Never let it be said that we don’t practice what we preach! Real time research, that’s the ticket. Unfortunately, sufficient procrastination through gustation can lead to bloated bellies and thighzable thighs. So can sitting at your desk for hours on end reading, writing, programming, or playing games, so…

Get out there and exercise! Yes, that’s very important. Go bowling, take a walk in the woods, play with the dogs, and pump some iron. All of these things make you stronger, healthier, and most importantly, get you away from whatever tasks you’re avoiding. Besides improving blood flow to the brain, those minutes or hours of physical activity might just give you a chance to find that vital inspiration you’ve been missing. Incidentally, it is clear that testosterone poisoning is an important contributor to stupidity in the male of the species. Therefore, testosterone levels must be controlled through frequent horizontal exercises upon a soft surface to maximize brain activity. More research is required on whether women benefit equally from the exercise… much more research performed as often as possible.

Procrastination Process Chart

Since some people are more visual than word-oriented, we thought we’d better illustrate our ideas with a flowchart of how not to complete a project. The other choice would have been to write another section or two. Since we ran out of ideas, the flowchart seemed more useful (to our purpose of getting this blog out tonight).

Tags: Game Design, Humor
Posted in Humor | 4 Comments »

Show Me the Gold – Game Economics 101

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

One of the biggest Black Swan events in history has been the meltdown in the financial sector. Triggered by risking lending practices, unemployment , real estate inflation, and overextended insurance policies (the “Credit Default Swap ” insurance market), the United States is currently undergoing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929-1933.

Games have their own forms of economic disasters. As with combat systems, game developers need to walk a narrow tightrope between giving players too much and not giving them enough. Inflation in gold, equipment, and character abilities is inevitable in a long-running game (either a game series or a massively multiplayer game). Careful designers put a lot of time and effort into balancing game economics so that the game is as fun as possible for most players for as long as possible. This can be done by restricting aspects of the economy, reducing restrictions in other areas to keep things balanced, or by providing bread and circuses so the players are distracted from economic issues.

How to Kill a D&D Campaign

Two of my early Dungeons & Dragons campaigns come to mind when I think about game imbalance. In one game, the beginning dungeon master tried to foreshadow the ultimate battle of the first few months of the game. Unfortunately, players tend to focus on the here and now, so we immediately went after an opponent that should have easily destroyed us. Unwilling to have the campaign end in its first week, the DM had an NPC lend us some powerful magic weapons. Using them, we easily won, nabbed the treasure, and found ourselves equipped with magic that should have come much later in the game. After that immediate gratification, the rest of the game was an anticlimax and soon ended.

In a game that I ran, I had a “Deck of Many Things” as a treasure at the end of the first major dungeon. One player pulled a card that jumped her character 5 experience levels, so we had a party of 2nd and 3rd level adventures with a 6th level Cleric. I could handle it these days, but at the time, I found myself completely unable to balance the fights. Anything that would be a challenge for the Cleric would inevitably kill the rest of the party. The campaign went on for a few more sessions, but then died out because I couldn’t keep it balanced.

Whoever Said That Making Sequels Is Easy?

The Wizardry computer game series ran into this problem. Following the typical RPG trope, players started out as very weak beginning adventurers. They gained spells, abilities, and magic items as the game progressed until they were demigod level by the end of the game. Wizardry 2: The Knight of Diamonds allowed players to import their Wizardry 1 characters and continue the game. While KoD was still a very fun game, there was much less room for variety in the game because the player characters started out at a very high level of power. Unable to keep that going, the authors set Wizardry 3: The Legacy of Llylgamyn a generation later, so that players created new characters and began again as beginning adventurers. Wizardry 4 had a nice twist – You play as the evil Werdna, trapped by the goody-goody adventures from Wizardry 1, and have to escape from your own dungeon … starting again as a weak character with few powers.

Dungeon Master had similar problems when they created a sequel that continued where the first game left off. Lori and I loved Dungeonmaster on the Atari ST and spent many hours exploring it. We barely got past the first section of Dungeon Master 2 – It was just too difficult and stressful to be fun.

We kept these lessons in mind when we planned the Quest for Glory series. We intentionally masked the limits of the skill system by putting skills on a 0-100 scale. We figured that players would assume it was a percentile system and that 100 was the highest possible. However, we knew that we would be setting the limit to 200 in the second game, 300 in the 3rd game, and so on. Instead of letting the player wield godlike power by the end of the first game, we gave him a few abilities that would be equivalent to 1st, 2nd, or perhaps 3rd level spells in D&D. That left plenty of room for improvement in the later games.

Despite that, we still had issues with inflation. We had to balance the combat and puzzles so that a player who started in the second game had a character comparable to that of a player who imported her character from the first game. We tried to keep the game fun and challenging for all character skill levels, encouraging the player to practice skills, but not absolutely requiring it. There were flaws in this process. I think that by the 3rd game in the series, many players found it boring to repeatedly throw rocks until they had a high enough throwing skill to win a spear throwing contest, and so on. We relaxed the “practice makes perfect” requirement in the last two games to try to cut down on the tedium. Of course, in doing so, we also reduced the challenge for players who really wanted tough fights.

Oh Yeah, About That Gold

You might find it strange that I’m deeply into a post on economics and so far haven’t even mentioned money. While gold and silver are the most obvious economic systems in games, there are really multiple economies at work. I’ve mentioned character skills. There is also learning curve inflation – where a player gets so good at the game it stops being challenging – character abilities, equipment, pun tolerance, combat and experience points, and several other reward and challenge systems. If any reward comes to easily, it loses its value to the player. If it becomes too difficult, players become frustrated and might stop trying to get the reward.

In the original Bard’s Tale, no character class had a healing spell until (if I remember correctly) level 3. It was also possible to meet very dangerous enemies with your level 1 party, and it was difficult to earn silver. As a result, almost all of the characters’ money was spent on healing and resurrection spells at the temple. Most players ended up “cheating” by creating mule characters, adding them to the party, transferring all their money, then deleting the characters. Players had to work around the game system because the economy was too stingy.

World of Warcraft and similar massively-multiplayer games probably have the hardest time with inflation and balancing the budget. WoW has been running for over 4 years now, and many of the players have become jaded; it’s difficult to find any reward system that will keep them playing the game. Blizzard has relaxed many of the rules that originally created a tight economy because they know that long-time players don’t want to put in as much work for rewards that will soon be superseded. (Oh, and I learned how to spell “supersede” a long time ago in a Superboy comic book. Lana Lang became suspicious of a Clark Kent impersonator because he mistakenly spelled it “supercede”. Never let it be said that reading comic books is a waste of time – at least not all the time!) Dungeons that used to require long and arduous “attunements” before characters could enter them were opened to all players. This has allowed a lot of players in “second tier” guilds to experience content that they would otherwise never see (see The Burning Crusade paragraph below).

Blizzard initially made a number of good decisions to keep their economies balanced. Rewards for slaying monsters and completing quests were scaled throughout the game, so that each level of player tended to have just a little less money than they needed to buy everything they wanted. Blizzard also restricted magic items by giving them a minimum level for use and “soul binding” them – Once a character has equipped a magic item, it can no longer be traded to other characters. More powerful items are “bind on pickup”, which means that only the character who first picks up the item can ever equip it. These decisions meant that a player with a rich level 60 character couldn’t create a new character and have it instantly become much more powerful than its level.

WoW also keeps players involved by holding special events, often tied to seasonal or “real world” events. During the Olympic Games in China, participants in the battlegrounds became “competitors” and earned special tabards. Winning a battleground gave players a chance to win a “Spirit of Competition”, a Chinese Dragon pet that had no game purpose except to look cool. Other “critter pets” include the Invisible Wolpertinger, a jackalope-like creature that you can supposedly only see when you’re drunk, the Baby Murloc that was only made available to attendees of the first live BlizzCon convention, and many others. The rarer ones are highly prized; some are sold for hundreds of real dollars on eBay.

Black Swans Invade a World of Orcs

There was at least one “Black Swan” phenomenon in WoW that might have been obvious to Blizzard, but caught me totally by surprise. Prior to the release of The Burning Crusade expansion, characters were “capped” at level 60. Unlike in Everquest, where the maximum level was a goal attained by few, a high percentage of World of Warcraft players got to level 60 with their characters. In order to keep them active and interested, Blizzard provided a large amount of content designed specifically for level 60 characters. This included the three major “raid dungeons” – The Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Naxxramas – that required guilds to put together well-balanced teams of 40 players at a time to have any chance of success. Most of the big World of Warcraft guilds were structured entirely around the raid dungeons.

The Burning Crusade changed that dynamic entirely. Players who had spent a year or more at level 60 raiding the dungeons or fighting against other Level 60 players in battlegrounds now found themselves doing quests and exploring 5-player dungeons again. In order to encourage players to buy the expansion and try out the new Outlands content, Blizzard greatly increased the availability of gold and the power level of magical weapons and armor in the new environment. Instead of the level 60 raid dungeons gradually becoming phased out, they were all abandoned the day TBC launched. With 20-20 hindsight, we can see that much the same thing will happen with all of the level 70 dungeons after Wrath of the Lich King launches. A few guilds may visit one or two of them for nostalgia, but they will soon be entirely abandoned as players focus on reaching level 80, exploring the new dungeons, and find more powerful items than they could get from the level 70 dungeons.

Overnight, the big raid guilds splintered. Nobody had any interest in struggling for hours in a level 60 raid dungeon to have a small chance of winning an item only slightly (if at all) better than what they could find in a 5-man dungeon in Outland. Some guilds set up teams of 5 players to work together to “beat” the dungeon content and get “attunements” to the new level 70 raid dungeons and heroic-mode dungeons. Many of the guilds collapsed, because the 40-man raid dynamic was what had provided the social environment that held them together. Others survived by emphasizing role-playing or by working together to make sure that everyone in the guild could find fellow adventurers when they needed them. The entire gameplay for most of the players altered.

The Bird’s-Eye View

How do you balance a multiplayer game? Step 1 is to make good initial decisions. Always be aware of the dangers of a runaway economy and build balances and restrictions into the game. Step 2 is to create simulators. Set up test cases for characters of various levels (or skill development for a non-level-based game) and earned or purchased equipment. Run simulations of combats and other quest activities with them to see if the better-equipped characters are overwhelmingly powerful. If so, make adjustments. Step 3 is to put the systems into the hands of beta test players and play testers. Separate them into groups and present different rules to each group. Then keep the ones that are most successful. Finally, pay attention to your players once the game goes live. Gamemasters and community managers can observe the players to see if they’re having fun and where they’re getting frustrated. If there’s too much money in the economy, find things they can spend it on that give them marginal improvements. If there isn’t enough, introduce new quests or other activities that make it easier to earn money. If all else fails, release an expansion.

More than anything else, game balance is what makes or breaks a computer game. Creating and maintaining well-balanced economic systems for gold, equipment, character skills, tension vs. reward, and other aspects of games is essential to creating games that last. Keeping a game balanced while half the players are trying to find ways to unbalance it is one the most challenging tasks faced by game designers and developers. As Julia Ecklar wrote in her song Crane Dance, “Balance is to understand the crane while it’s in flight.” Cranes and black swans – Look at game economies from a bird’s eye view. You’d be bird brained not to.

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007) discusses rare, unpredictable, and catastrophic events that – after the fact – people say, “Oh, it was obvious that was going to happen.” The current government intervention into the U.S. banking system definitely qualifies as a Black Swan.

Unemployment statistics understate the real issue, since they do not generally include “discouraged workers” who have given up on trying to find work. As unemployment has grown, people have been unable to make their mortgage payments. That’s what is really meant by “high-risk” mortgages – Lending to people who lose their jobs.

The CDS, or Credit Default Swap, is a new type of financial instrument within the last 10-15 years. Companies insure lenders against customers who default on loans. The problem with CDS’s is that they are based on averages. That leaves the insurers (such as AIG) unprepared for catastrophic Black Swan levels of default. The current CDS market is estimated at $55,000,000,000,000 – that’s $55 TRILLION. CDS’s allowed a lot of lenders to overextend themselves with risky loans because they were insured. That didn’t help when the insurers couldn’t cover the losses.

This article was written by Corey and illustrated by Lori. Mojo is Lori’s Troll Beastmaster in the World of Warcraft game who is the proud owner of a baby Murloc.

Tags: D&D, Economics, Game Design, World of Warcraft
Posted in Game Design, General, Heroism | 5 Comments »

“Christmas in September”

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Corey is in a little bit of a panic. We’re helping put together the local “Christmas in the Mountains” celebration and Corey volunteered to design a “treasure hunt” game for it. As of last Tuesday, he didn’t have it ready yet.

“So what?” asked someone at the last committee meeting, “Christmas is still three months away!” Well, game developers quickly learn that, in the game industry, Christmas is really in September (or even July or August, but most assuredly NOT in December).

Backwards Teach You to Work, We Shall

All game development projects use a “backwards calendar”. We want people to buy our games for their friends, family, and themselves to use as presents. In the U.S., the biggest Christmas shopping weekend is the one immediately following Thanksgiving – the 4th Thursday in November. This year it’s November 27, which also happens to be Corey’s birthday. That won’t happen again until 2014.

Oh yeah… the backwards calendar. So, games had better be on the shelves by the last weekend in November or they will miss the most important Christmas sale weekend. Before they can go on the shelves, they need to be shipped. Since the game companies want to make a profit, they prefer to ship their games by slow freight, not overnight airmail. So we back up another 2-3 weeks or so to early November.

Before a game can be shipped, it has to be manufactured. This is a complex process that frequently involves multiple vendors – printers, box manufacturers, disk duplicators, and so on. When the first disks come back from the duplicator, they’d better be tested; you’d be surprised how often someone screws up and the disks are unplayable, have the wrong software version, the wrong labels, or some other product launch killing error. When this happens, the only option is to stop the duplication, find the error, fix it, and get the disks duplicated again. Similar problems can happen in the other phases of manufacturing. Anyway, that takes us back to mid-October.

The Quality Assurance (Sisyphean?) Nightmare

Game developers are incredibly brilliant, you know, so they just design their games, create some code, art, and music, and send them out for duplication… NOT! Corey was incredibly proud of the careful effort that went into developing Castle of Dr. Brain and was confident that it would pass through Quality Assurance with very few errors. Then he got the first pass of bug reports, a stack of bugs (one per page) almost 2 inches thick. Chagrined, he mentioned to the QA lead that he thought they’d turned in a clean game. The response was, “You did. Come look at this.” On the top of a filing cabinet in the QA department was a stack of bug reports almost 4 feet high; those were the as-yet unresolved bugs for another Sierra game being developed at the same time. So we need to back up at least another 3-6 weeks for quality assurance and fixing all the problems the expert (and sadistic) game testers find. That’s early to mid September.

So September is a time of euphoria! After anywhere from 6 months to 5 years of work, the game is finally done. QA hasn’t seen the “final” completed version yet, and all is right with the world. Of course, that means that in July and August, everyone on the team was working 60 hours a week to have a prayer of getting all the game features done by September. By September, everyone is exhausted, and the last thing they want to hear is that crunch time has barely begun. Much more work will be required to fix all the glitches, balance issues, and outright errors that the master QA’ers will soon uncover.

For Now It is Christmas Time

Interestingly, Christmas in the Mountains has similar issues. Lori sent publicity releases to travel magazines months ago so that we can be in their November/December calendars. Posters, advertising flyers, and the treasure hunt clues have to be printed and distributed. Merchants have to be contacted to see who wants to participate in the treasure hunt. Clues have to be customized to the participating merchants, so some really fun ones might never be used. We have to train volunteers to give appropriate hints to people who get stuck. And we’ll have to be prepared to handle last-minute emergencies, such as a popular merchant running out of clue sheets or simply losing the whole packet. Even a small game for a few thousand players (or 5 or 6 close friends, for that matter) takes a lot of time, effort, imagination, and preparation to prepare.

Fortunately, we have infinite free time to work on this. It isn’t as though we’re writing a weekly blog, creating an online school for heroes, working on an interactive fiction game, rehearsing carols (another Christmas in September activity), raiding Mount Hyjal and the Black Temple, and trying to pay bills and otherwise run our lives. Oh wait, maybe we are doing all those things! If one of them comes in a little late, please forgive us; at least you’ll know why.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyous Noel, Happy Solstice, Kwanzaa Greetings, and Happy Holidays to you all – It’s Christmas in September!

Tags: Game Design
Posted in Game Design | No Comments »

Rock, Scissors, and Paper Tiger

Friday, September 12th, 2008

You’ve all played Rock, Scissors, Paper, right? It’s a two-player game in which both players simultaneously reveal a fist (rock), open hand (paper), or two fingers (scissors). Rock breaks scissors, paper wraps rock, scissors cut paper. If both players make the same choice, it’s a tie and they try again.

Did you know that there’s a professional Rock, Scissors, Paper tour? Actually, we’re not sure there really is one, but there are international tournaments and two different events each year that bill themselves as the World Championship of Rock, Scissors, Paper. “Professional” RSP players call it Roshambo. It sounds more mysterious, and it’s a little shorter.

Rockin’ the Night Away

On its surface, Roshambo seems like a totally random game. If you programmed two computers to play each other, and one always chose randomly, it wouldn’t matter what the other one chose. In the long run, they will tie. In real life, the game gets interesting because the players try to psych each other out. You either predict the move your opponent will make or use psychological tactics to get him to make the move you want. The game rules are evenly balanced, but players’ minds are not.

Perry Friedman, a Roshambo World Champion and Tiltboy, once gave me a few tips on the game. New players rarely pick Rock as their first move – It feels unnatural to start with a closed fist and keep it that way – so Scissors is a strong first move against an amateur. Of course, he might have told me that just so that I would pick Rock first next time we played so he could be ready to counter it with Paper. Sneakiness is an important attribute for a Roshambo champion.

One Rule to Rule Them All?

We keep reading books and articles on game design that basically say, “All games are variations on Rock, Scissors, Paper.” Everyone nods their heads sagely at such an obvious truth, then works on their latest RSP game mechanic. The only problem with this is that the “rule” isn’t true and lazy application of it leads to bad game design.

The idea is as simple as RSP. Create some variation in the game by creating several different types of units, then balance them so that every unit has its Nemesis. If artillery is strong against cavalry, then make it vulnerable to infantry. If a Wizard easily defeats a Warrior because armor doesn’t stop his spells, then let a Rogue sneak up behind the Wizard and kill him before he can react. This is much more interesting than giving everyone the same strengths and weaknesses.

The concept is simple and obvious… but it’s a little too simple. If all conflict was determined by numbers and formulae, then an RSP model might work fine… and make a really boring game.

Black-and-White Logic in a Multi-Colored World

The problem with “Roshambo rules all” is that the real world is fuzzy, not binary. Bart Kosko, in his book Fuzzy Thinking, talks about the philosophy of fuzzy logic. Kosko claims that fuzzy set theory does a better job of describing the real world than do traditional mathematical models. When we talk about “tall people,” we don’t mean that everyone over six feet tall is “tall” and everyone else is “not tall.” There are degrees of tallness. In traditional Aristotelian logic, everything is either part of a set or not part of it. Fuzzy logic is designed to solve problems that are best described by “partial membership” in sets.

Roshambo has no grayness. There are only three possible actions, and the results of each pair of actions are clearly defined. Great games have many more factors and no black-and-white answers. The excitement comes from uncertainty and the idea that “on any given day, anyone can win.” A combat (or competition) is decided not only by the game rules, but by the relative skill of the players and other factors such as equipment, environmental conditions, and the actions of other players and “monsters.”

World of Warcraft combat is fun because it is unpredictable. There is a Roshambo bias for who “should” win in an otherwise equal encounter, but it’s just an edge, not a guarantee. And that’s pretty much true in every great game. There has to be room for player skill to make a difference. If the game is totally symmetrical, then there is no reason for a player to choose a particular type of unit and the game might as well be simulated on a computer rather than played.

Of course, if the game is too asymmetrical, everybody will choose the strongest units and the game developers might as well have left out the rest. This is why game balance is one of the hardest aspects of game design to master. A seemingly minor tweak can result in some players becoming far too powerful or others becoming hopelessly weak. As characters or units become more powerful and complicated, achieving game balance becomes a tremendously difficult job.

A Hit-Driven Business

Coin flips, Roshambo, and dice rolling in Dungeons & Dragons all have something in common – They have black-and-white rules for who wins. The best game designs hit the sweet spot between such deterministic rules and total chaos. Players tend to see patterns where there are none, and often assume randomness where a game is actually deterministic. This leads to what I think of as the “probability fallacy.”

Is a coin flip actually a 50-50 proposition? Only before you flip the coin. Once the coin falls, the result is known and is either 100% heads or 100% tails. The same applies to most game puzzle situations. Something that is a 75% probability really means that 75% of the players succeed 100% and the other 25% fail… or resort to restoring saved games until they “win.” Role-playing games get around this by repetition – If there is a 25% chance the player will get a particular item on killing a monster, he just has to kill dozens or hundreds of them to find the 10 or 20 items required for a quest. This can get more than a little boring and repetitious, but at least it gives players an extra reason for killing those monsters.

How about the actual combat? Dungeons & Dragons and its spiritual descendants have you roll two dice. The first roll determines if you hit, the second how much damage you deal. There are some problems with this approach, especially in an online multiplayer game. When you shoot at a moving target in Quake, do you hit it? It might look like a very obvious hit on one player’s screen and an equally obvious miss on the other.

A Warm, Fuzzy Feeling

A better fuzzy logic approach would be to apply a series of fuzzy rules to the combat – What sort of attack are you making? What kinds of defenses does your opponent have in play? How far apart are you? How much movement is involved? How good are your stats and equipment, and how strong are the opponent’s? A fuzzy combat system would combine the results of all the rules and come out with an appropriately-averaged result. This might be that you graze your opponent for a minor wound, or that you get in a solid hit, or that you miss entirely. The actual amount of damage would take all factors into account instead of being a random dice roll.

Obviously this isn’t a good system for a paper role-playing game where the players have to make all those calculations. But computers happen to be good at doing a lot of things fast. Why should our video games be tied to restrictions inherited from paper gaming?

Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness featured a fuzzy logic combat system. We think it was one of the most successful approaches in the series. Players could choose to fight as in an arcade game, or they could set a “combat style” and have the computer take actions according to that style. All of the “monsters” had individual fighting styles of their own. We think this made combat pretty interesting and helped players with poor arcade skills be able to enjoy the game.

We’d like to see more games use a fuzzy logic approach to conflict resolution. It isn’t much harder to program than traditional logic and it solves a lot of problems (such as the effect of lag) that have proven very difficult to solve with binary logic. Most importantly, a fuzzy logic system is much easier to balance because the reasoning can be recorded and observed. In effect, a well-designed fuzzy system can tell the developer or player why it made each decision.

So what will it be? Thinly disguised games of Rock, Scissors, Paper in which the game systems are transparent, boring, and can be manipulated by the players? Or tear up that paper tiger and create rich, complex game systems that use the power of fuzzy sets to balance themselves? Truly great games favor the skilled player, but leave enough room for a lucky, less-skilled player to compete and have a fair chance of winning occasionally.

Tags: Game Design, Quest for Glory
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Star Trek: The Final Frontier

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Lori’s friend Susan sent her an article from her local paper about the closing of the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas. This was a exhibition and simulator ride based mostly around Star Trek: The Next Generation. Given that the show has been off the air for fourteen years, it really isn’t a surprise that they finally shut it down.

And yet, it’s sad.

These were the Voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise

Her 5-year mission was extended several times – The original show, The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise. Each series had its own unique flavor, but they all stretched our imaginations and made us wonder about “what is out there” beyond the limits of our solar system.

We don’t consider ourselves to be Trekkies, although our lives have been heavily influenced by Star Trek. As children, we watched the original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. (Lori, of course, had a crush on Spock at the time.) Corey still remembers sitting on a couch with his family watching the season previews and how excited they were about the upcoming Star Trek show. Corey’s father helped run his father’s corner store in New York City and read every issue of Astounding Stories, If, Galaxy, and other pulp science fiction magazines. Corey grew up in a living room filled with books and magazines, many of them science fiction and fantasy.

The Prime Directive

Although the Enterprise crew seemed to forget it occasionally – when to do so was convenient to a story line – all starship crews were required to follow the Prime Directive. They were not to interfere with other civilizations, nor even to reveal the existence of the Federation or star ships to pre-spacefaring worlds. Wikipedia quotes it as:

“No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.”

Of course, they proceeded to break the rules right and left, all in the name of the Greater Good. Sort of like the concept of the Quest for Glory Paladin who must decide between the laws and justice.

The Star Trek series took on issues of war and authoritarianism, of personal heroism and working for peace. It was set in a world with no borders and no race or sex barriers – no limits. Then there was the overall message of hope – we will make it to the future, and the stars will be ours to explore.

Those were pretty good lessons to grow up with.

To Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations

Quest for Glory owes much to Star Trek. Yes, there’s the USS ‘Exitprise’ in the Magic Shop of Shapeir. On the hero’s way in to Shapeir, the magic carpet almost gets hit by the starship going into warp drive. But there’s much more than that below the surface.

Star Trek was always about going to new lands and new civilizations. The crew’s missions were all about bringing peace to war-torn worlds and creating a better future. Uhura, the Warrior and Adventure Guildmaster in ‘Trial by Fire’ and in ‘Wages of War’ was named after the character in Star Trek for a reason. In Swahili, the word uhuru means freedom. (We learned this from a Star Trek filk song!) We wanted the player to set people free from fear and evil. We wanted the players to feel like true heroes.

To Boldly Go where no one has Gone Before

We have seen the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas several times. We ate at Quark’s Bar and Restaurant and talked to Klingons and Ferrangi there. We even got an Evil Tribble from it. This was a battery powered tribble that would wiggle and purr when we first got it… but little did we know its true nature. After a while, it would turn itself on at odd times and give low, growling noises and it wouldn’t shut itself down. I think we locked it away in a chest somewhere. Perhaps by now it has escaped and plotted to take over the world with the Evil Meep… but that’s another story.

We have a garland beside the kitchen with a string of lights and Star Trek ornaments. Our favorite drinking mug has a Klingon Bird of Prey. Lori even has a pressed coin with the Bird of Prey symbol on it from the Experience in her purse. She isn’t quite sure where she can spend that, but she’s well prepared for the Klingon Invasion. She even has a Klingon font on her computer, since you never know when you may have to answer an ultimatum from an invading alien species.

We’ve even played Klingon characters in D&D. Well, technically they’re Uruks, but the DM based them on Klingons, and they’re pretty much indistinguishable personality-wise.

We’re still not Trekkies. Er… by some definition. Even if we have gone to a Star Trek convention or two. And Grok Spock.

All Good Things…

Anyway, we’re sad that the Star Trek Experience has gone away. It’s sad that all of the Star Trek TV series have come and gone. Then again, they all seem dated and hokey in today’s world. They had their final voyage, and it’s time to let them sail away.

But the Legacy of Star Trek will live on.

Live long and Prosper. Q’plah!

Photos of ‘Corey gets Borged’ (he got better) and ‘Klingon Warrior’ were taken at the Star Trek Experience four years ago. ‘To Boldly Go’ is original art by Lori.

Tags: Game Design, Quest for Glory
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