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The Sights and Sounds of Ancient Cities

by Reed on October 9, 2011 at 12:34 am
Posted In: Blog, Video Games

In my last post I talked about my recent trip to Turkey and my penchant for a good old-fashioned ruin. They invigorate me, inspire me, fuel my imagination. They make me want to write about their glory days so I can spend time walking their streets, if only in my mind and on the page. As my wife and I walked the broken marble streets of these ancient cities, I swear I could hear the crowd swarm about me. Touts shouted their wares, and officials congregated in the bouleuterion. The entire experience was quite visceral and compelling.

At first I attributed it to a past life, echos from that time I was a pleb in Rome filtering through the ages like I’d spent too much time in Assassin’s Creed’s Animus.  Or maybe it was just my own over-active imagination. Then I read an interesting observation by Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe on how video games might alter our own sense memories.

 

His post led me to view my intense experience in the ruins in an entirely different light. Is it possible that my sense memories didn’t come from a past life at all, but were instead implanted firmly into my subconscious by hours of playing Caesar III during my formative years? It makes sense. Video games are immersive, and as technology and game design advances it becomes easier and easier to lose yourself in them, similar to how Assassin’s Creed caused me to view a walk downtown as an obstacle course. Who need’s Abstergo when your XBox is creating real memories of events that only happened in a binary universe.

I can hear the masses railing against this brainwash from in front of their TVs as their waistlines expand. Even my parental superego raises an eyebrow at the possibility that experiences might be injected directly into my temporal lobe. But, if true, is this really such a bad thing? Some might argue that the realism of first person shooters is desensitizing us to violence and lay the atrocities of the mentally disturbed on the shoulders of recreational games. But even as I accept that my perceptions of real life events might have been altered by my time with video games, I refuse to believe that they can control us. If anything, my experience at the ruins was only heightened by these digital memories. While immersed in Assassin’s Creed, an everyday walk on the town becomes an adventure, and life gets a little bit more interesting, even if it isn’t entirely real. Is that such a bad thing?

└ Tags: Featured
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And Then They Were One

by Reed on September 30, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Posted In: Blog, Uncategorized

It’s been over a month since my last post. What could possibly explain such an inexcusable lack of updates? Well, I got married and spent half a month traveling around the Turkish countryside. If you’ve ever gotten married (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it) I’m sure you will forgive my inattention to this site, and while there are countless game and writing related topics I’m itching to talk about with you, today I’d simply like to share some of the amazing experiences my wife and I have had over the past month.

The Build-Up

From the beginning, my wife, Dassance, and I knew we wanted a non-traditional wedding. We wanted a celebration, not a ceremony. We also knew that we would be preparing, planning and executing the entire thing ourselves — no room for a wedding planner or professional catering in our budget or our vision. Shortly after the proposal, we had it all figured out. Six months before the wedding we were ready. Food? Taco truck. Decorations? Decided. Cake? Mom’s on it. Music? Kick ass iPod playlists. Drinks? Homebrew and mojitos. There wasn’t a question about our wedding that we couldn’t answer.

We spent the months leading up to the wedding becoming less and less prepared. If you haven’t experienced it, it is difficult to explain, but the time leading up to the wedding, all the way up to the second you begin to walk down the aisle, is an epic crescendo of entropy. Long before the wedding, when the event is still abstract and unreal, it seems so easy. Saying “we will have thousands of origami butterflies and Japanese paper lanterns” solves the problem of decoration. But it doesn’t make the butterflies or hang the lanterns. As the day, hour and even minute of the wedding approaches, the sheer amount of work that needs doing in order to realize your vision comes into increasingly sharp focus, to the point that you find yourself running in circles shouting for decorative thumbtacks.

Mercifully, the moment of the wedding arrives and the frenzied preparation comes to a silent halt as people begin to walk down the aisle. What’s done is done and what couldn’t be finished is left undone and life goes on. Those decorative thumbtacks that seemed so important ten minutes ago evaporate when you see the love of your life, radiant, coming down the aisle to join you for the rest of your life.

The Big Day

Our wedding was the most fun I’ve ever had. After the short eight minute ceremony, my new wife and I emerged onto the most amazing scene of merriment. There was juggling, hula-hooping, piñatas, confetti and of course copious amounts of alcohol. Most importantly, there were 120 close friends and family from across the country, all gathered to wish my wife and me a joyous life.

The celebration after the ceremony is all a bit of a blur. The food was great, the company unmatched, and the wine flowed like a river (maybe explaining the blur…). Despite efforts to speak with everyone and thank them for coming, it quickly became apparent that it was a losing battle and before we knew it, dusk had settled on the reception and it was time to dance.

The great irony of weddings is that they are rituals to bring two people together, but those two people inevitably spend the entire night apart. Dassance and I spent very little time together after the ceremony, but the dancing was a welcome chance for us to escape the chains of conversations and relax in each other’s arms for a few short minutes before being whisked away into another game of “Ninjas” or a conversation with a long-lost friend. But it was all okay because the next day you get to wake up with your wife, while that long-lost friend is back on an airplane and who knows when you will get to see him again. The next day you realize that it’s not just a celebration for the bride and groom, but for everyone who came because they love you and want to share in your new life.

Together At Last

We had a quick turn-around between wedding and honeymoon. Our team of generous helpers got the wedding site all cleaned up, leaving us the opportunity to relax and get ready for Turkey. We decided on Turkey because we wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been before, that had amazing history, as well as beaches for the obligatory post-wedding relaxation. Dassance and I are both annoyingly well-traveled and we worked our way through all of Western Europe and much of the Americas before we found a place that fit our criteria.

Turkey had been on my radar since my brother came back from a tour of Europe with stories of amazing food and better Greek ruins than Greece. I’m a sucker for ruins. Show me a tumbled down pile of marble and I become invigorated, gaining an almost superhuman ability to trek through blazing sun as the wrecked city comes to life in my mind. I hear the bustle of citizens as I walk down two thousand-year old roads, feel the roar of crowd wash over me as I sit in the seats of an ancient amphitheater.  Sadly, ruins seem to have the opposite effect on my new wife. More like kryptonite to her Superman,  Dassance trudged on, amazed and awed by what we were witnessing, but drained by the experience, and as the days of ruin-watching wore on, she became weaker and weaker.

It was time for a break, and we found it on Bozcaada, a tiny island that has been producing wine for Dionysus worship for the last four thousand years. And it had beaches. Beautiful, clean Aegean beaches. A day and a half on Bozcaada and Dassance was ready for Troy. Not the movie, Troy – that put us both to sleep… on three consecutive nights. No, after relaxing on the beach we made our way to the real Troy. Not much to look at anymore, but the weight of history that is packed into that tiny archeological site is stunning. We had experienced ruins far grander, but Troy felt both familiar and momentous. Visiting the ancient city that spawned both the city of Rome (according to legend) and some of the greatest tales ever told fulfilled a lifelong dream.

But it was by far not the only dream of mine to be fulfilled of late. I have married the love of my life, celebrated in grand fashion with a party that far exceeded our expectations, and added another amazing country to the list! So forgive me for not posting sooner. It’s been a busy month.

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You Scratch My Back, I’ll Stab Yours: Cooperative Board Games at their Best

by Reed on August 15, 2011 at 4:43 pm
Posted In: Blog, Tabletop Games

Every board game I can remember playing as a kid was competitive. Most were simply a race to get to a space on the board, like Shoots and Ladders or Sorry (I fondly refer to it as “Sorry I made you play this game”), other games, like Monopoly,  were epic quests to slowly torture your friends and make them never want to see a polyhedron again. Playing these games as a kid, I learned how to win and lose gracefully. More importantly, I learned that winning’s no fun against a sore loser, and sore winners make losing even more excruciating than it already is.

Psychology of Winning and Losing

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve played a lot of games in my day. I know that it feels good to win, I know that it sucks to lose, and I know that people react very differently (often badly) in either outcome. In my experience, it’s much more difficult to lose to another human that it is to lose to a system. Not that losing is ever fun, but it’s easier to die in a video game, for example, than it is to be slowly and inexorably driven into abject poverty by your “friends” over the course of 5 hours. In a video game we usually just shrug it off and hit continue.

Interestingly, the feeling of accomplishment and success from beating a video game isn’t diminished compared to winning against your friends. In many ways it feels better because the video game usually won’t bitch about that cheat code you entered back at the title screen or complain about how it never wins.

This combination of satisfaction in victory and perseverance in defeat makes video games an appealing alternative to board games, especially for those who don’t handle losing gracefully. If only we could find some way to capitalize on this quirk of the human psyche in the board gaming industry… But wait! We can!

Enter the cooperative board game. Making a board game with satisfying wins and soft losses isn’t easy and games approach cooperative play in different ways. In the following section I look closely at several cooperative board games and see what works and what doesn’t.

Levels of Cooperative Play

Straight-Up Coop: Arkham Horror is a prime example of this type of coop board game. It’s the players versus the rules and the luck of the draw. Can the players coordinate their actions and utilize the skills and tools provided to overcome the obstacles created by the board? This style of coop play is satisfying with the least potential for conflict because in the end, everybody  at the table is a winner or a loser and all players are united in a common goal. Any conflict between players is cause by different ideas of the best way to achieve the same goal.

Straight-Up Coop (Or Is It?): This is Straight-Up Coop with a mechanic that creates the possibility of an adversary amongst the players. Shadows Over Camelot uses this method. It’s a good style for players who enjoy surprises and munchkining in their games but, in the case of Shadows Over Camelot, once the traitor is revealed, it’s pretty much game over for the traitor. If I were to make a game with this mechanic, I would create a more satisfying play experience for the traitor after being discovered. Part of the reason for the unsatisfying options for the traitor post-revelation might be simply incentive to keep your treacherous nature concealed. Still, if the traitor is discovered early in the game, it’s an hour and a half of not much fun for one of the players at the table…

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Stab Yours: Games like Munchkin and Risk allow the players to cooperate if and when they want to. In my experience, this sort of coop is exciting, creating some very entertaining table-talk and player interaction, but inevitably leading to betrayal and in some cases hurt feelings. This type of game is still competitive at its core and there can be only one winner, so cooperation is ephemeral and alliances are strictly on an “until it serves me better to stab you in the back” basis.

It’s Us Against You!: Mansions of Madness, the sequel to Arkham Horror, is only semi-cooperative. Instead of players against the game, it’s players against the “Keeper,” a kind of referee and storyteller somewhat analogous to the Dungeon Master in D&D. While this model works well in D&D, where the DM can’t actually “win” the game, in Mansions of Madness, things can get a little touchy. The fact that the Keeper is actually trying to win the game crates a fair amount of conflict between players and keeper. Add that to the fact that the odds are very stacked against the players and you have a recipe for frustration and a tough loss. With this game, it is best that players who don’t lose well play the keeper.

The Referee: The obvious example of this type of cooperative game is D&D and other table top RPGs. While not exactly a board game, D&D has evolved more and more towards the genre with game pieces (miniatures) and a game board (dungeon tiles). In this type of cooperative game, one person at the table plays the referee (DM in D&D) who acts as an arbiter and storyteller. Their job is to make sure the story progresses and that the players are having fun and playing by the rules. Many DMs don’t understand this, but the referee is not an adversarial presence, even though they control the forces of evil. The players, however, are usually united in the common goal of fighting the DM’s monsters and destroying his carefully laid out plans. Conflicts at the table are similar to straight-up coop in that players have the same goal, but often disagree on the best way of achieving it.

Cooperative Gameplay in the Games of Ismia

So what does all of this mean for the games of Ismia? Readers know that I have been working on implementing some cooperative elements into Heroes of Ismia with the new party quests. The party quests in Heroes could be described as straight-up coop, but I’d like to work in some more munchkining opportunities. Or perhaps I could come up with a version of the game that requires all the players to work together against a single epic quest, instead of having each player working on their own. In the end, though, I think Heroes will always be a largely solitary journey, despite my efforts to remedy that.

What’s the answer?  How ’bout a new game! It’s quite premature, but I have been working on the next game in the Ismia franchise. Siege of Ismia will be a straight-up coop game from start to finish. It’s been set aside while I work Heroes into a presentable prototype, but once developed, Siege will be a 1-6 player game where each player has a defined role and multiple paths to victory or defeat based on how well they play against the random elements put forth by the normal progression of a turn. I also have some interesting new battle mechanics worked out that I look forward to sharing once Heroes is closer to completion.

For now, I will continue to work on incorporating some more cooperation into Heroes of Ismia through party quests or some other mechanic I haven’t yet devised. If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. Drop a line in the comments section.

└ Tags: Featured, Game Design
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A Day With PopCap

by Reed on August 10, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Posted In: Blog, Writing

I’ve been visiting my best friend up in Seattle who’s a motion video artist with PopCap Games, and I had the opportunity to help his team out with a video shoot yesterday. Without divulging any information that hasn’t already been divulged, it was an afternoon of mischief and shenanigans and yes, even a little bit of hijinks stirred into the mix– a cocktail of fun I like to think of as PopCappery (a term that may already exist, but I am re-coining now).

For the event, I donned the fetid guise of Zombie Temp Worker and shambled around a garden for the afternoon. Turns out, Zombie doesn’t have a green thumb… well, he does, but the only way it’s going to grow any plants is as compost because Zombie demonstrated he doesn’t know the business end of a rake. It was refreshing working with a group of such talented people who get the job done well but know how to have fun while doing it.

To cap off the whole day, we got a group of PopCappers together to play test Ismia. It was the first time that I had the chance to step aside and watch people play the game and the experience was enlightening. Everyone provided great feedback, and I look forward to working in all the great suggestions.

If you’re interested in seeing more adventures of Zombie Temp Worker, check the PopCap blog regularly. There should be some great undead PopCappery coming your way soon!

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Game Design Diary: Updates and Co-op Quests

by Reed on August 4, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Posted In: Blog, Game Design

It’s been several play tests since the last revision of Heroes of Ismia, in which classes were completely reworked and character movement was increased amongst other changes, and I’m ready to give another update on the state of the game. I’m in the middle of hurried revisions because next week I’m going to be play testing with a group of professional game designers and I’d rather not embarrass myself. On the one hand, I feel like the game is really beginning to take shape, with fairly well-balanced combats thanks to the tier system, and quicker quest completion from the 2d6 movement, but there’s still a long way to go and the bulk of the game feels largely repetitive. Here are a few changes I’m working on to shake things up:

Wandering Monsters

A long-time problem with the game is that combat didn’t feel incredibly integrated. I tried adding more combat based quests and greater incentives to go monster hunting, but we still found it possible to go most of the game without having a single combat. Enter the wandering monster. I changed one of the wild card sides of each resource die to a wild/monster. During a gather action, if you roll 2 or more wild/monsters, you must immediately have a combat and defeat the monster before you can collect your resources. This rule proved a little problematic early in the last play test when my fiance got trapped in a catch 22. She needed to complete quests to be powerful enough to survive a combat, and she needed to gather to complete quests, resulting in two character deaths; an issue that may need to be addressed.

Non-Combat Powers

After all the changes I made to character powers, when actually play testing, they seemed a bit overwhelming. Players often forgot about powers because of the abundance of options. Also, most powers were combat based, and players rarely used their stamina or magic resources for anything other than drawing an action card. To fix this, I am working on gathering and movement powers for each class; powers that will require stamina or magic and enhance actions other than combat. Hopefully this will force players to more carefully monitor their resources.

Party Quests

This is the most exciting change: quests that require players to work together and coordinate their turns, an idea suggested by my friend Jeff, a partner in many a board game adventure. Party quests represent global events that require the attention of every player. Failure to complete a party quest results in a permanent penalty or alteration to the game board, but success yields incredible rewards for all players.

The hope with the addition of party quests is that player interaction will be stressed even more. A drawback to many board games is that players spend much of their time focussed on their own goals. They are only reminded that there are other players involved when their actions are thwarted or when they are offered another beer. The PvP powers and cards I put into effect in the previous iteration helped, providing some of the highlights of the last few play tests, and this is a chance to add even more.

More to come after the next round of play tests!

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