Risk #2, Transparency

Even more comments along from my last post and last time at mmocrunch.
I'll quote Inktom,

Unfortunately Hulkageddon 1 and 2 has made safe mining impossible even in empire space. Since Apocrypha and the introduction of wormhole space, you can get that 0.0 feel and profitablility without venturing past gatecamps getting to null or lowsec. They even have wormholes that lead to 0.0 and that enables the term: Stealth mining. But that requires a few hulks and an orca. HUGE RISK! But tremendous reward if you pull it off.

But EVE is not for everyone, but gets the risk/reward ratio right.

My responce

No, not a huge risk. It’s just the impression of a huge risk – what info do you have to prove it’s a risk?

For example, say someones in front of me, flips a coin and it’s my call, heads. They hand me hundreds of game coins and I go weee! Also I don’t lose my game coins.
Now imagine someone goes off into a black box, then comes back out and hands me a few hundred game coins?

Did I face a big risk? Did they flip a coin while they were in that black box? Or did they just decide to hand out game coins to me?

Should I go weeee! or would I just be fooling myself?

Without transparent risks or atleast some level of transparency, you don’t know.

Who loves zombies!?

Everyone <3 zombies! Some teaser shots for the current game I'm developing.

 Hehe.

Grouping isn't always healthy

Augh! Just reading Tobolds blog and I find the attitude in one entry kind of sick. I'll quote my responce for context

Augh, Tobold, your position sounds like a kind of sickness? You want people to make friends, not because they actually like the other person, but because they can't have fun with the product they bought if they don't.

That's a terrible reason to make friends! That's not even making friends, it's just finding people to use.

If people like other people, they'll make friends and group with them even if there's a bunch of NPC's to group with. This whole article seems to be tainted with some idea that it's not important whether people want to do things with each other.

What you need is some mechanism to help people come in contact more, so they actually know what other people are like in order to have a chance at making friends

I mean honestly, it goes back to the worst of the worst table top roleplay habits, where people who would have absolutely nothing to do with each other outside of roleplay, would indeed roleplay together so they could get their game fix. It's an incredibly unhealthy attitude, but here we have the same perpetuation of the idea the game should force people together not because they like each other, but because they want their mmorpg fix.

What you need is some system by which players can get to know each other. This was done, retardedly, by forcing people to group or they get nowhere. You just need a system which gets them in contact without such a blunt instrument involved.

And it's not hard to knit together a bunch of reward systems for entering in details of what you like, then more rewards for browsing other players. And no, I don't mean holding back part of the game like loot and seeing the insides of certain dungeons - I mean handing out some gold or such. Which will mean social gamers are richer, but that's not gimping the main content for any soloer.

Honestly, the fact that mmorpg design kind of fell together into a retarded block content unless you group model is excusable since it fell together. But to perpetuate a culture of people finding other people, not because they like them, but because they want to use them to get at a game they've already paid for? It's unhealthy.

humour - Laugh Out Silently?

Games 'that are art'

Continuing on from play this thing

I think he's right, it's not art. A finely crafted chess set might be art as an object, but that doesn't make the game itself art. Nor does a bunch of arty stuff in a video game make it rise above being a game. It's just a crappy game with a bunch of art tacked on, in this case.

Now, can you make art by playing a game? Yes, yes you can. But that still doesn't make the game become art itself. A paintbrush can make art - that doesn't mean a painbrush IS art itself.

It's actually quite annoying to see people create art with a game in their own heads, then attribute what they created as being part of the actual game/activity. It attributes too much to the game and does not give credit to their own creativity. Table top roleplay suffers from this extensively.

Free will - how free?

If you've come across the biomechanical arguement in terms of free will, this is something to consider. Even if will is simply an execution of physics, the word 'simply' is not enough. If you trace the smoking gun of physics, it didn't start yesterday, nor the day before - it traces all the way back to what we currently understand as the larger origins of everything, the big bang.

Even if free will is simply physics, the final expression of physics that is free will is an expression that originates in a big and still pretty damn mysterious explosion! You could literally consider your own will as a small ongoing part of that explosion. Indeed if scienctific evidence forces you to think of youself as biomechanical, then your just as much forced to consider yourself as a small part of that explosion, ongoing.

Will we grasp the origins of that explosion more thoroughly in future? Probably, but its a much more grandiose thing. The frightening element of simply seeing oneself as a biomechanical machine is that it seems so pointless and meaningless. But that's basically because it's such a short term way of looking at things (if humans are very flawed, to look at it this way is to engage in another flaw). Beyond our ability to grasp from moment to moment, we trace all the way to one huge explosion that pretty much made everything (or atleast allowed it to exist/birthed it). That's pretty significant!

If you haven't run into the biomechanical arguement - in a way you both need to know, yet I'm lothe to say since I wont be there to run it past you in person. I'm not sure it should be passed on alone. Anyway, here's a long essay that might help on it - it's long, so maybe you wont get through it anyway, or find the length to be some company.

Also see: Philosophy: An arguement against "Humans are fundamentally bio-mechanical"

Game design diary: challenge approach vectors

One of the playtesters of my new computer game said he could rush past the enemy generators to the end. He thought this wasn't my intention. Well, it wasn't my intention to always do it - but it was my intention that it's one additional approach vector to dealing with the challenge, beyond just shooting it.

I suppose I was thinking of fallout 3 combat, particularly in the open wasteland, and how there are usually several ways of approaching it (or even several ways of being approached by it!).

I once heard this anecdote of some general from the past that would, as he traveled, ask his fellows what they would do if an attack came from a certain hill or copse of trees. So as to have some sort of plan in mind if it did actually eventuate, rather than waiting for it to crop up and make something up on the spot.

It occurs to me that there are probably two ways to approach a game - just try to beat it, and the other is to use it as a training platform for 'what if' scenarios. In the latter case, just rushing past all the time isn't training yourself for all the possible 'what if's. Yes, it's possible. That doesn't mean the training platform fails - it can't train you into wanting to train for what if scenarios.

On the other hand, most people play in the former case, just trying to beat it. So in the end I put a 70% chance of an invisible wall in front of the boss. So you can decide to risk getting up close to see if you can rush through, or just fight it conventionally. Or even if you can rush through, you might fight conventionally if that's what your training yourself for at the moment.

I should probably make up a name for that training platform idea, since I use it alot and thus really need to refer to it quickly alot.

No story? Or did you forget what you did?

MMO crunch asks is borderlands a mmog, and in doing so asks if there is a story
http://www.mmocrunch.com/2009/11/09/is-borderlands-a-mmog/

This is what I had to say in short:

In terms of story, I always look at gamers who expect to read a story in an interactive medium and think "Wha!?". It's an interactive medium - YOU make the story.

 
What I would grant is that these games, not at all right now, have any tools to record player actions and layout a story (or atleast a log of cool events). So it's easy to forget the story you just made.

Taking it further, the specific ways the program recorded events would shape the story made. Like if it puts more emphasis on rescuing someone than blowing up ten guys at once...well, then the emphasis would be on rescues. You would be making the story, but the 'bard' who is recording it would also influence how it's remembered.
 
But you just don't see any of this right now in games...or do you?
 
Remember all the stat pages of the games you've played? That record lots of stuff you've done. See, it's coming! Now gimme lots of money for just saying it first! lol!