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Meanwhile…

We stopped by the MoCCA comic show yesterday, mostly for Eileene’s benefit. I tend to stay at arm’s length from comics, as I do from all art forms, treasuring only a very few favorites and ignoring the merely good. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile may belong in that elite first category.

Shiga caused a stir a couple years back with Book Hunter, a very tongue-in-cheek mashup of Dirty Harry, CSI, and—very loosely)—an actual, historical investigation into a rare book theft. The drawing was rock-bottom, but the writing was excellent; Shiga managed to carry that all-too-serious tone through the entire satire. His use of frames and gutters, too, was excellent, but can’t hold a candle to what he’s done with Meanwhile.

Jimmy, the protagonist, starts with a simple choice between chocolate and vanilla at the local ice cream parlor, but this simple decision can have extraordinary consequences when an inventor’s mad science gizmos come into play. Between a time machine, a mind reader, and the killinator, things quickly get out of hand. Essentially, Meanwhile is a choose-your-own-adventure tale with pictures in addition to text. Nothing very new, then, structurally: a roughly tree-shaped graph muddled by occasional backtracking and loops.

This basic structure, however, is handled very adroitly, offering your options as narrow, arrow-like paths between panels, often leading entirely off the page to a tab designed to lead you back into another page. The tabs are cleverly planned to feed the story back into itself. Shiga, aware as a comic book artist must be of the space between the content, also hides easter eggs in several spots. Unlike the choose-your-own-adventure books of my childhood, the action accelerates to its conclusion, so those unavoidable glimpses of other pages and other panels is a lot more intriguing; no matter where you are in the story, what lies ahead is more dramatic. Those, too, are very cleverly designed so as to make those glimpses both intriguing for the accidental glance and misleading for the deliberate cheater. Also unlike the old books, there is a single, coherent storyline, masterfully handled so as to expand your perspective in a series of revelations.

Anyone familiar with Scott McCloud’s landmark Understanding Comics is likely to recognize this as the realization of his vaguely conceptualized multi-dimensional, multi-pathed comic, which he explores with a much simpler story of Karl drinking and driving. Whether Meanwhile is a conscious reaction to Karl and his beers or merely a case of great minds thinking alike, I couldn’t say, but the actualization is far better than the conception. Curiously, the actualization is done on paper, rather than taking advantage of the possibilities of hypertext and the web to spin a tangled, interactive tale…and the book is a joy to behold where a series of web pages would simply feel like the web.

2011 04 11 mdlake Writing Comments (0) Permalink

Two Complex

We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart.

There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility and ease of play on the other. Everyone has their individual preferences, and every group finds its own balance between these competing qualities. Our group tends to orbit games just a whisker more complex than Settlers of Catan—Small World is the current favorite, and we tend to play a lighter game toward the day’s end, when brains are burnt out. Games markedly longer or more complex than the gold standard of Catan, such as Agricola or 1830, aren’t very popular; deeper games get neglected, as do the players who want to tackle them from time to time.

Sadly, our two new games waiting in the wings, Through the Ages and Civilization (the board game) fall firmly in this latter category. Both are ambitious attempts to encapsulate all human history into a workable package. Eileene and I took a stab at Ages a while ago, the simplified tutorial version, and that was modestly complicated—nothing show-stopping, but lots of fiddly maintenance functions, like producing and consuming food to maintain as well as grow your labor pool. The full game will doubtless be even more tangled; whether all the extra work will yield extra fun is less obvious. Civ never even got fully unwrapped.

Talking people into trying games like these is a chore in itself. Teaching the rules to a table full of players, not all of whom are willing to sit through the instruction, is harder still, especially when still learning the rules myself. So I tend to beg off from trying.

Yet the more time that passes, the more I suspect that’s just a convenient excuse. I’m beginning to think that maybe I don’t really want to dig into long, slogging games myself. This is becoming more apparent as a new crop of friends brings new games, and I’m on the learning end of things. I’m still willing to take on complex games, but I’ve grown to see complexity as a necessary evil, whereas in my youth it was simply how things were, or even a positive attraction. Experience has taught me to ask, if only in the privacy of my own head, “Is all this really necessary to make the game fun?” And increasingly, the answer is “No.”

2011 04 11 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

TTT–Freeware

Okay, okay, they got me. Sort of.

As an April Fool’s Day joke, jayisgames.com, a website devoted to freeware and shareware web games, offered a review of the new turn-based strategy game Tic Tac Toe. Even small children recognize tic tac toe as far too ancient and far too simple to waste time on, except when the point of the exercise is something other than play—for example, when a novice coder implements the game simply to exercise his coding skills.

I figured such an exercise was offered for review at jayisgames on a lark, and that the reviewer (“Tricky,” which should have been a hint), knowing tic tac toe far too well and realizing all his readers did too, decided to have some fun with it. Hence the high-falutin’ language about territorial dispute, an implied back story, the philosophical ramifications of war to perpetual stalemate, and other rhetorical flourishes. Hey, if I were a reviewer called upon to review tic tac toe, I might well do the same.

But silly me: the game itself was an April Fool’s joke, albeit one which I came across five days late. So they got me. Sort of.

2011 04 07 mdlake Games
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It is Dark. You are Likely to Suffer a Critical Failure.

Fishing for new RPG fodder, some designers have gone too far afield. Parsley Games are self-contained scenarios designed to mimic old-school text adventures like Zork. The players attempt to win the scenario with simple verb-object commands like “get lamp” and “go east” and “eat profiterole.”

One poor player is stuck with the role of “parser;” he reads the scenario ahead of time and judges, when play starts, whether the other players’ commands are succinct and relevant enough to have any effect at all. In some ways he is analogous to the more traditional GM, minus all the interesting parts: creating the scenario, judging the action, and guiding the story. All acceptable actions are described in the game itself; anything else earns some variation on “You can’t do that.” Presumably, the parser tries to construct his refusals as wittily possible, partly because snarky variations on “No” were part of the fun of the old text adventures and partly because he’s got nothing else to amuse himself.

This sounds like a lot of fun. For twenty or thirty minutes. For the players. If they, like me, played enough Infocom games to enjoy the nostalgic thrill. Otherwise, it just sounds like an ordeal. There’s a reason people gave up on those old Infocom games. Several reasons. And grappling with the parsers, no matter how sophisticated they got, was a big one. Tamping the creativity inherent to any decent tabletop RPG back down into a finite list of acceptable commands transforms the RPG back into a mere puzzle again, most of which finds its challenge in grappling with a cumbersome interface, made doubly cumbersome by passing a computer’s dogmatic reactions through a second interface of fallible human speech. Something like writing letters by passing text through a babelfish translation and back again, the fun only lasts as long as you’re willing to put up with it.

As a big Infocom fan myself, I would love to play one of these. Once. Then I would like all evidence they ever existed destroyed, before people begin thinking, “Hey, what a good idea!”

2011 04 06 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

The Seduction of Obeisance

Looking at the world through someone else’s eyes can teach surprising lessons. Even when the someone else is fictional. Even when it’s your own RPG character.

Let’s see if I can get through this briefly. Our current campaign is another variation on the “secret magical war” so successfully pioneered by White Wolf. Everybody who’s anybody in this game has a tether: an invisible, archetypal friend who grants them supernatural powers and may just be an externalized manifestation of psychic powers that everyone ought to have but may not have the right mental (im)balance to conjure up. Lots of “what the heck is going on here?” story.

My character, known only as “Deacon,” is a hard-eyed killer, our group’s premier fighter as well as self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. He quotes biblical passages a lot, and subscribes to an Old Testament view of punishing the wicked, though in truth his moral perspective has more in common with other ancient codes of law other than with the ten commandments. He contributes a lot to moving the story toward decisive action. He contributes almost nothing to figuring out what the heck is going on here.

That’s very unusual for me. I’m a puzzle-solver by nature, and working out what the heck is going on is generally my favorite role-playing activity. Creating a character who doesn’t try to work it out usually takes a deliberate decision to play against type, and ongoing discipline to maintain that decision. But I found a lack of curiosity easy and natural for Deacon—so easy and natural that I didn’t even realize he had none until a fellow gamer wrote up a couple pages of speculation: what we know so far, what we might reasonably conjecture, and where we might go for further answers. Since I felt very much at sea at the time, it came as a real surprise just how much we did know and how much structure Dave’s analysis lent to all that data. “Oh, yeah, I remember that. And that. No, it makes complete sense that they’re causally related.” It’s the kind of thing I usually do, or have to fight to suppress. So why didn’t I?

Searching my soul, and Deacon’s, for the answer, I found that Deacon simply hadn’t been paying attention to “the small stuff,” actually quite important. And in doing my best to stay in character, I hadn’t really been paying attention to it either. He (I) was busy scanning the metaphorical horizon for threats and passing judgment on everyone we met. Making sense of it all was a job for the psychiatrist/anthropologist with her sophisticated education and for the oracle with his mystical insight (neither of which, it might be added, was Dave’s character). And at the core of this attitude lay faith: faith in experts, faith in prophecy, faith that everything would unfold according to God’s (the GM’s) plans if I just stayed true—Deacon true to his principles, me true to my character. Without deliberately deciding to stop thinking, I had simply drifted into it, lulled into complacency by the power of simple conviction.

Faith makes life a lot easier. It also makes you stupid.

2011 04 05 mdlake Games
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Education Deduction

Did our taxes this weekend, to find a happy surprise: we now qualify for educational credits. As recently as 2009, we didn’t qualify because we—by “we,” I mean “Eileene”—made too much money. But the ceiling for claiming a tuition deduction has been raised to something like $80,000 per person from an earlier ceiling much closer to the poverty line.

Though I’m glad to take the deduction, I question whether someone making $80,000 a year (or $160,000 for a two-income household) really needs that money more than, say, all those educational budgets the federal government is slashing for lack of funds. Benefiting personally from the adjustment doesn’t make it right.

2011 04 04 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Two Complex

We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart.

There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility and ease of play on the other. Everyone has their individual preferences, and every group finds its own balance between these competing qualities. Our group tends to orbit games just a whisker more complex than Settlers of Catan—Small World is the current favorite, and we tend to play a lighter game toward the day’s end, when brains are burnt out. Games markedly longer or more complex than the gold standard of Catan, such as Agricola or 1830, aren’t very popular; deeper games get neglected, as do the players who want to tackle them from time to time.

Sadly, our two new games waiting in the wings, Through the Ages and Civilization (the board game) fall firmly in this latter category. Both are ambitious attempts to encapsulate all human history into a workable package. Eileene and I took a stab at Ages a while ago, the simplified tutorial version, and that was modestly complicated—nothing show-stopping, but lots of fiddly maintenance functions, like producing and consuming food to maintain as well as grow your labor pool. The full game will doubtless be even more tangled; whether all the extra work will yield extra fun is less obvious. Civ never even got fully unwrapped.

Talking people into trying games like these is a chore in itself. Teaching the rules to a table full of players, not all of whom are willing to sit through the instruction, is harder still, especially when still learning the rules myself. So I tend to beg off from trying.

Yet the more time that passes, the more I suspect that’s just a convenient excuse. I’m beginning to think that maybe I don’t really want to dig into long, slogging games myself. This is becoming more apparent as a new crop of friends brings new games, and I’m on the learning end of things. I’m still willing to take on complex games, but I’ve grown to see complexity as a necessary evil, whereas in my youth it was simply how things were, or even a positive attraction. Experience has taught me to ask, if only in the privacy of my own head, “Is all this really necessary to make the game fun?” And increasingly, the answer is “No.”

2011 04 04 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Dragon Age 2–the full view

I finished Dragon Age II tonight. All my earlier thoughts still hold, although the pig-in-a-poke Gotcha! missions about which I complained became mercifully less common as the game progressed. (In their place came missions you were free to accept or decline, but still had to perform after declining: transporting a Qunari mage to his execution, helping Merrill reassemble her mirror, killing both Orsino and Meredith in turn regardless of which you backed in their big showdown. Not really an improvement.) In addition to these early impressions, there’s a big one to add from the perspective of completion: DA2 seems…short. Like a downloadable add-on rather than a full game in its own right.

That’s not entirely fair. I haven’t played a lot of console games, so I don’t yet have a good sense of how much play time your money normally buys, but DA2 seems at least comparable to most of the titles I’ve tried—Killzone, Borderlands and the multiple-award-winning Bioshock, for example. It is, however, much, much shorter than the original Dragon Age: Origins, which took me a lot more than three long, lonely Saturdays to complete.

The raw number of hours, however, don’t provide a complete picture of the subjective experience of play time. DA2 is divided into three acts that, despite foreshadowing, have virtually nothing to do with one another. In place of DA:O’s epic ten-to-fifteen-act storyline, building to an enormous climax, we get three standalone vignettes that fail to provide a sense of epic scope and feel, therefore, brief.

Combat, too, contributes to this sense of brevity, in two ways. First, a lot of it is disjoint from the mission(s) at hand. DA:O took place largely in caves and wilderness, and you might have to claw your way through one to four mapsful of intervening monsters to reach the climactic boss fight; DA2 takes place almost entirely in a single city, so you can walk directly to the mansion, basement, or back alley and get to work. To pad out the fight sequences, DA2 has you jumped by a lot of random street gangs who neither advance the plot nor lend it any sense of scale. Second, combat is a lot easier than it was in DA:O. Oh, there’s a few tricky fights, to be sure, but only a few, and they lie at the beginning of the game rather than the climax because, while your enemies keep pace with your growing hit points and raw damage, they don’t keep pace with your increasingly sophisticated tactical synergy. At standard difficulty, early fights are dangerous, but any basically competent weaving of tactics, by hand or even in the standing orders menu, makes later fights cake-walks. And because the fights go faster and easier as time passes, rather than becoming more dangerous, the game feels fast.

Top it all off with blatant recycling of maps, recycle content as “homage” to the original, and cut out individualized back stories, and the whole product feels like something of a rush job. A polished rush job, to be sure: the dialogue is at least as good as DA:O, the tactical dilemmas at high difficulty intriguing, the look and sound and feel of the game strong. But the short eighteen-month production schedule shows, possibly exacerbated by Bioware’s investment in the upcoming Star Wars MMO. Rather than cut corners on quality, they cut corners on size. A fair trade in my opinion, if it has to be one or the other. Fans who expected another vast epic may disagree.

2011 04 01 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Root of All Binary Good/Evil Scales

I’ve noticed a nice touch in Dragon Age II: weapon and armor shops sell good stuff. Dragon Age: Origins had a few nice things in its shops: magical tomes that would increase your attributes and backpacks to increase your carrying capacity. But weapons and armor? On rare occasion, you might find gear superior to your own, but only marginally so. Any arms you bought would quickly become obsolete, often in the next adventure or two. Almost all the good gear—most the weapons and all the armor sets—worth having were scripted drops for killing specific monsters or completing specific quests. The few exceptional items available in the shops were the very best of the best—but as such, you could only buy them for the final few encounters; the cost was very nearly the total value of the booty you accumulated throughout the course of the game, which money you would easily have by the end of the game. There was no reason to shop, except to note where to return to buy your superweapon before the big showdown. Until then, save your cash.

DA2 isn’t quite like that. I know enough not to buy small upgrades, but significant upgrades are available at a price, one which I’ve been sorely tempted to pay. Buying occasional upgrades might mean giving up the very best weapon available by the climax, but it would mean operating with good gear throughout the rest of the game, probably a good deal. (In theory, the big boss fight might be nigh impossible without the best gear, so there’s a bit of risk here, but this proved not to be the case with chapter-ending boss fights, so I figure I’m safe.)

Money is largely an outdated holdover from old-school D&D, which serves as great-granddaddy to all these electronic “RPGs.” We kill bad guys and loot the corpses for money because we’ve always looted the corpses for money. Even though rifling goblins’ pockets for spare change doesn’t really serve the heroic image. Even when the story is no longer about accumulating riches. Even when money contributes nothing to your chances of success at whatever the story is about. Just because players expect it. So game designers keep giving us virtual pocket change and inventing some excuse to spend it.

Done artlessly, it simply leaves the players piling up ever greater warehouses of useless lucre (Borderlands, Fallout 3). Done somewhat more skillfully, but no less transparently, you earn ju-u-u-ust enough to afford to purchase upgraded gear from the shops at whatever pace the designers feel is appropriate for the next set of bad guys, calibrated to be just barely beatable with the aid of the new gear. (And why do we insist on upgrading our gear, for that matter? Another relic of granddaddy D&D.) But we could do better, even in a game like DA2, which is all about navigating moral dilemmas and not about becoming rich and powerful. Perhaps especially in a game like DA2.

See, money isn’t good for anything in itself; money is only worth what you can spend it on, and if there’s nothing worth spending the money on, the money itself is worthless. And if the value of money is nil, the temptation of bribes, theft, and blood money is likewise nil. DA:O and DA2 both offer such temptations, but they’re toothless: you don’t need money to get the best gear in DA:O, and you don’t need the gear in DA2, so you have no reason to sell your principles. Want to make a game about navigating moral dilemmas? Make that money—or rather, the gear it can buy—important to success. Really important.

I can understand the hesitation to make the selling of principles really worth something. Standing on principle has to be a viable option; you don’t want players unable to finish the game because they didn’t knife dear old dad for the inheritance back in Scene 8. But what if knifing dad means the difference between finishing the game by saving the kingdom by slaying the dragon quickly and cleanly or saving the kingdom by slaying the dragon only after it devastates the countryside, because you didn’t have enough firepower? Now there’s a dilemma to give pause even to bleeding heart paladin types. What if a beloved companion actually dies if and only if you don’t fight sufficiently effectively?

Well…reality check: player abilities vary widely, from video game superstar to putzes like me, so calibrating such challenges through combat may be impossible. A challenge that asks me to sell my principles or reload the big boss fight ten times might not make my brother-in-law blink; a game that asks if he’ll sell his principles for success is probably one I’d find unplayable. Still, there should be workable non-combat situations to exploit the issue. Cough up 50 gold (and be unable to afford the +15 sword of vorpalness) or kidnappers kill the duke/your sister/a super-cuddly kitten.

DA2 flirts with such issues: early in the game, you have to perform a morally questionable task to earn bribe money to get into Kirwall, and antisocial choices are occasionally worth a bit of extra coin. But the game never really pursues the possibilities to their logical conclusion. Bribes and theft and blood money are only worth a small fraction of your income—maybe 5%—and the things money can buy, while nice to have, aren’t necessary for victory, even for a video game putz like me. The game could do so much more, with a little healthy cruelty from the game designers. Money is a major contender for the title of biggest single temptation to moral failure in the real world. Why not exploit it in a game of moral decisions?

2011 03 31 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Abandoned Fantasies

Studying game systems and searching for campaign inspiration has taken on a sudden urgency. Ella, our current GM, has announced that she’ll be traveling: to the Philippines for a couple months, maybe elsewhere for longer, while she tries to work out where to go next after some major life events. Her intention is to return from the trip to continue the current campaign; maybe the rest of us can entertain ourselves with a mini-campaign (6-8 episodes) in the meantime. The plan looks good on paper, but long experience, both with games generally and with this group in particular, suggests otherwise.

Indeed, we tried something very like this before, when Jude got a ministerial job just as he was set to start a campaign of his devising, and found he couldn’t manage the commute from his new location. As it happened, I had two campaign concepts nearly ready, but needed some time to polish either one up, so we decided to fill the gap with a brief, very episodic steampunk-y horror-y sort of thing with GM-ship rotating among us. This was to be a quick-and-dirty filler, so little or no effort was to be spent on concerns like enforcing continuity or tying up threads or arranging a proper climax.

Well, it didn’t work. Because the filler campaign was also my idea, I spent time on that which could have been used to prepare the next campaign properly—and it was still ready before everyone was willing to drop the steampunk-y- horror-y sort of thing. Fun ideas are tenacious, and the players I know are loathe to put them down before finding out What Happened Next, regardless of what they may have agreed…until you set them down. Dropping a campaign in progress is nearly impossible, except by utter necessity, and then only to substantial disappointment. (“I’ve been called up for duty. Sorry guys.”)

Returning to a campaign once the players get excited about their next set of characters, however, is even more nearly impossible. Jude is back with us, though sometimes by webcam. His aborted campaign? Aborted for good. If too much time passes between conception and implementation, you lose the driving excitement of trying on new characters for size. The players get a chance to imagine what they might do in the campaign, construct and complete that story, however vaguely, in their heads, and be done with it before dice ever hit the table.

We’re just not going to see the end of Ella’s campaign. I feel it in my bones. It won’t be the first aborted; we have a long list of campaigns that collapsed with changing membership. It won’t be the last. But it will fade from view in the glittering promise of whatever comes next.

2011 03 30 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink