Airways and Ethics: Skys of Mondea

Back on the Bus
So here we are, my first return post to MMO design. Before I get too far into this, the goal isn't to "make a game". At the end of the day this is a glorified thought experiment, but the constraints one might apply to a real design are a useful set of constraints for this thought experiment.

This is not intended to be a wholly solitary endeavor. I'm accepting not only constructive criticism, but also brainstorming and design collaboration. If you see some way it could be improved, just throw it out there. No guarantees it'll make it into future discussions, but then I tend to never guarantee anything.

The Foundation
Title: Skies of Mondea
Base Gameplay: Flying Airships
Core Conceit: Players/Player Characters as Moral Agents
Constraints: No quests/writing. In other words, no content design.


So lets take this from the top.

Flight
The landscape that makes the most sense to me is to simply not employ a ground level at all, meaning no method of landing or transversing the ground, to the point of keeping land hidden below a cloud layer at all times. Instead the landscape design will be one of drafts, updrafts, down drafts, east/west/north/south drafts, which apply directional motion to the player. In other words to sit in a north draft will cause an unmoving ship to always drift north, will increase the acceleration and maximum speed of a ship moving north, will apply a northward drift to a ship moving east/west/up/down, and decrease acceleration and maximum speed of a ship traveling south.

Ships come in 3 classes, light, heavy, superheavy. Lights are fast and maneuverable but are heavily subject to drafts. Wandering into particularly turbulent areas will typically cause extreme loss of control, these areas should be clearly marked. Heavy are slower ships that see less effect from drafts, capable of ignoring all but the strongest, but also not particularly benefiting from complimentary drafts. Superheavy ships ignore all drafts, in fact if dynamic drafts are supported they would create drafts around themselves. A Superheavy is actually capable of moving quite quickly, but has terrible maneuverability and takes a particularly long time to slow down.

Lights are capable of leaving colored smoke trails, and can drop smoke cannisters to mark resource deposits hidden below the cloud layer. Heavies are capable of resource acquisition, permanent marker buoy deployment, hauling, and are an ideal platform for diving competitions as they can fight updrafts and acquire downward speed more easily. Superheavies function more as home bases with lots of storage, a place to park yourself, and can move swiftly across vast distances. Certain heavies can also act as modular attachments to Superheavy ships, providing services such as player housing.

Ships can never run out of fuel so as to be completely stranded, they can only enter a state at which their speed and maneuverability suffer severely. Weapons are not currently planned, sorry sky pirates.

Moral Agents
A moral agent must fit a certain set of criteria. They must be able to make choices, they must form an opinion on the morality of those choices, those choices must be what game designers would call interesting, in other words they cannot be foregone conclusions. Interesting choices implies scarcity, for instance there is no ethical choice in deciding whether or not to steal a resource if that resource is infinitely available in infinite quantities. It also implies soft rules, there is no ethical decision in not stealing resources if there was never an option to steal resources. And finally it implies consequences, as there is no ethical choice in stealing a resource if doing so has no consequence to any party involved.

When players interact with each other, they are always acting as moral agents, that's the good news. Our job then is to make them interact with NPCs and the game world as moral agents, a significantly harder task as the NPCs themselves cannot be moral agents. However, the non-player characters can be used to simulate the behavior of moral agents. Alternatively they can be used as a quite literal "voiceless and powerless" population, which has ethical implications I won't go into here.

For now there are two major items that must be removed from the table, the win state and the unnamed instance. There can be no win state because having one makes winning the overriding moral imperative within the context of the game. The unnamed instance is also, by it's very nature a non-entity, a pure object to be used as befits the current goals since it's existence is limited purely to the context of those goals. An example of an unnamed instance would be any mob or npc that is considered not as an individual, but as merely an identical instance of a particular archetype.

This does not have to mean that every NPC needs to have a full life simulation, but they need to have some persistence both as an object within the game world, and as an engine of choice. Say for instance we gave players the ability to tip NPCs with variable amounts of cash, then a flight deck attendant who was regularly given very large tips would eventually leave the flight deck and reappear in a higher status in society that required some starting cash, such as a shopkeeper. Alternatively, a flight deck attendant who is never tipped despite having a salary that relies on tips will soon disappear and reappear at some similar level in society, while their job will likely take longer to fill due to being unprofitable.

Ethics is, at it's core, a complex subject. It cannot be our goal to define what Ethics are, or what is/is not ethical. The goal is to create the depth of field and necessary conditions for there to be issues of ethics and morality at all. This is why I began not with what a moral agent is, but rather what is required for one to exist. However, if I were to lay out a heuristic for what sort of choices would be needed in order to have interesting ethical choices, I would avail myself of two kinds of decisions first and foremost. Decisions of short term loss for long term gain versus short term gain for long term loss, and decisions of personal gain at others expense, versus others gain at personal expense.

I'm not going to go into specifics in this post, there will be plenty of opportunity to expound upon this in later entries.

Why No Content?
I choose to add a constraint against content design in this in spite of the fact that it is actually very useful for our purposes. The problem is that it's more likely to be used as a band-aid than as an actual fix. Once you have a band-aid solution in place, problems begin to rise from it and you eventually find yourself arguing in circles about something that isn't terribly important to an actual working model.

In this case, I'm really looking for a ludic solution. Once you have a ludic solution in place, we can then began to create deep, rich content that takes advantage of it. Without that solution though, your content will almost always be ineffective and will largely be chaff to be ignored as people play "the real game".

CO Free Weekend - A Critique

An image of my main hero, Arare, from the login screen.

The Free Day Or So...
So Champions Online had a free weekend, which I found via Steam. It had intrigued me earlier, but not enough to actually buy sight unseen, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try. I downloaded the client through Steam on Friday afternoon, Sunday morning I was done patching and had a chance to get in and play around.

Yes, that was over a day of patching. The total patch size was 2 gigs, my pipe can handle that in about an hour or so, therefore I can only assume they were pretty hammered for bandwidth at the time. Not to be too much of a Monday morning quarterback just yet but... why did they advertise it on Steam without the ability to have them handle patching? No offense to the people at Cryptic but Steam's account numbers most probably dwarf theirs by a significant margin. I understand the concept of wanting to get lots of people to try out the game, but I don't think slashdoting yourself is really all that helpful overall.

The Point: Irony
Thing is, after one day I'm pretty well convinced that Cryptic has managed to land me in an ironic situation. Truth be told, the game is a blast to play so far. In fact it's so fun that if they had a free trial to begin with chances were I would have bought the game, but since I recently bought Borderlands, I'm now too broke to afford the initial $40 $35.

So what is it that Champions does oh so very well? Could it be their itemization makes Diablo players salivate? No. Do the missions create those same sorts of free form, randomly RPing groups that CoH did so wonderfully? No. Well does it tell an epic one of a kind story that grips you by the nadgers and won't let go? Hell no. The place where Champions really shines, above all else and in a way that puts most MMOs to shame is... playing the god damn game.

Seriously, that picture up there is of an acrobatically inclined, beast stance, guns akimbo hero. I spend the entire time madly jumping and running around my enemies spraying them with bullets and then closing in for the occasional "gun ballet" kick to the balls. Equally as fun is one not pictured here where they have dual swords for their energy gain power and a psychic sword for their real damage output and are also acrobatic.

What More Is There To Say? Plenty.

Yes the game is fun to play... at least up to level 11. Within that sentence was contained what seems to be Champions greatest flaw, character levels. The great Achilles heel of their design is that they begin with fun game play and then level people out of it. My main gunslinger is already suffering from a major stats problem. Their recovery stat is falling behind a laundry list of other important stats meaning that my energy bar is getting to the point where only about 25% of it is capable of regenerating outside of combat. I've found ways of dealing with it so I'm not a cripple but without a few other fortuitous decisions my character would likely have already found themselves a hopeless gimp.

It leaves me wondering time and again, why? Why does this game have character levels at all? There are plenty of other forms of progression they could have gone if they just wanted stickiness, supergroup levels, alignment with various organizations, storyline, equipment, nemesis levels or even a sort of "gotta catch em all" for powers and costume bits. So why, with everything they already have and everything they could have done just as easily, did they choose to make the game with character levels? This is an honest question by the way, I sincerely do not see any way in which that decision assisted their design. In fact the more I look the more ways I see that it hinder it.

And The Rest...

While levels may be the designs fatal flaw, performance in general tended to be a rather thin line. Considering I only had one day in which to experience it, there certainly was a lot of rubber banding and just straight up lag. Never quite to the point of being enough to quit over, but enough that over time it would certainly grate on the nerves.

Level 10 PvP had a certain binary quality to it the few times I tried it. Generally one team was fairly well organized and moved as a group completely dominating the other group with extremely low, or no, casualties. I wouldn't write off the PvP completely, it is still interesting to see how different powers mix and compete, but I wouldn't rate it as more than a sideshow. Also I only saw the "cage match" style so perhaps the other style is a significant bump up.

In Closing
I can only repeat what many other internet commentators have said, "lots of potential but fatally flawed." Somehow Cryptic managed to take some of the magic little bits of CoH, like that first time you fly, and turn it into truly fun game play. Then, in the same breath, they managed to grab some of the very worst parts of RPGs in general and mixed those right on in. The great tragedy of it all is that while it's initial potential completely blows you away, the fatal bits are so fundamental that it's simply far too late to change.

A bit of painting I was just working on.

MMO Design Discussion to Return Soon

I've taken some time off from MMOs, going back to single player games has given me a great deal of perspective, in my opinion. Single player games have a few simple rules that seem curiously absent from MMO discussion. A: If this isn't your game, go play something that is. B: If you aren't in the mood to play a game... don't play it. It'll still be there tomorrow, and probably a lot more fun then. C: You're game's competition is not Starcraft, Brain Age, and Halo 3, it's whatever else in your genre is happening to release in a nearby time frame.

I certainly realize those don't work on a one to one basis in the MMO market, but they do help pad out some foundation. Before I get back into seriously discussing MMO design I'm going to lay out some basic rules, definitions and philosophies. I'm tired of talking at cross purposes with everyone, so from now on these can be used as a filter for all discussions unless explicitly stated otherwise.

The Definition of Success: Actually there are two. In the case that a core overriding goal is specified for the design, success is closeness to achieving or expressing that goal. If however there are no defined goals, a successful MMO has a subscriber base large enough to theoretically pay back it's development team in three years given it's business model. When in doubt, assume 30 million in development and a sub model of $15/month. That's about 220K players without box costs.

A Game Not the Game: The WoW killer and the Platonic game are pretty much pure flights of fancy at this point. If you find yourself wondering whether a design will kill WoW or be "The Perfect MMO", stop yourself right there. My goal will always be to design a game, one intended to exist in a field of many, not some ideal of a game. Also the mechanics will have flaws, period. You cannot design non-flawed mechanics, so any discussion of mechanics will be mainly about how well they fit the overall concept, not whether or not they are flawed.

When in Doubt, Quit: My personal philosophy is that if a game stops being fun, stop playing it, at least for a while. This also means that you can assume any game I design is supposed to, assuming I don't forget, encourage that behavior.

Two for Tuesday: A game exists within the context of the games around it. This also means that there is no point putting time and energy into a system that games around it simply do significantly better than my concept will allow. In other words, no "one game to rule all play styles" reasoning. If someone else does one bit better, I'd rather they played that for that bit, and my game for my bit.

The Inefficiency Coefficient of Efficient Content: Measuring the efficiency of content in number of players who get to see it is simply wrong in my opinion. Content does not exist on it's own and for it's own sake, only as part of a larger context of the game. Ergo if the game seeks to benefit players going off the beaten path, one time content is perfectly applicable to that. Content that is seen by all players but breaks suspension of disbelief or disrupts the flow of game play should still be weeded out. If you absolutely need some other measure of quality, then go to the level of positive reporting by the audience who do see it.

Ludic and Narrative Harmony: I strive for it.

Quest Hubs, Quest Givers, Quest Vendors, Quest Aerospace: I'm not going to say I won't use them, but it seems to me there is a lot of space to explore in what exactly most of these are.

Dude Where's All the Rats: Just because almost all of our games have rats doesn't mean you should just assume the ones I'm talking about do. Some won't have mobs, others just won't have static mobs. For even some others, they may be enemies who simply don't fit the mob classification.

206 Odin

The raw pencils of a comic that I had the idea for last night.

Artistic Tendencies

Just some recent artwork.











And this one is NSFW:
http://twitpic.com/m4zye

A question for the listening audience.

Just real quick, I was wondering if any of my readers were reading this on their phones? And if so is it because of or in spite of the layout?

September 25th, 1958

From the diary of Dr. Arland Wright:

Having already lapsed a day in my journaling, I had feared that this journal would be of difficulty to maintain. However, while present in my mind, I can hardly wait to write of this days events.

It was in the early morning that I was gathering samples in the area of the old town hall. The fore of the building had survived the years of quarantine well enough, hardly looking dilapidated in the slightest, the rear, though, had caved in long since creating something of a garden area. While in this partially enclosed space, I was standing with my back to the opening when I noticed a shadow cast on the ground. When I turned to investigate it's source, I found myself not but a few inches from the face of a vampire.

The skin on her face had a the quality of rubber drawn taut, the veins and muscles of her face were clearly visible without any fat to obscure their shape. Her eyes were of startling properties, the irises being a bright pastel purple and the general shape being slightly too round and too tall to seem correct on her face. I was immediately taken a back out of reflex, but she instead leaned towards me, as if to examine me for her own curiosity.

The shock had left me unable to find an appropriate reaction, and so I merely remained still. I was never more aware of every inch of my body, I was afraid that even small twitch might startle her and end this momentary meeting of the species. For a few seconds I even found myself pondering the possibility of removing the top of my hazard suit so as to get a better view of the creature, but what small rationality I had preserved persuaded me otherwise. Nonetheless I found myself in place for what seemed like far too long, and yet every moment brought a fear that it would soon end.

In those moments I had a better chance to study her general appearance. The rest of her visible body was barren of fat, as her face had been. Her musculature, combined with the lack of swelling around her stomach, seemed to indicate this to be a property of her race and not the result of being malnourished. Her clothing was an old style of workers pants about her legs and a crudely sewn bandanna about her blonde hair. The fact that her breasts were exposed hardly seemed to be bothering her, and I would have to admit that their form, that of the skin being pulled taught over two small spheres, made them not of any particular stimulation to myself either.

Finally, the vampire grew bored and decided to escape my presence at best speed. Even the form of her running seemed feral, though not so much as to be completely dissimilar in form to that of a typical human's running. At this point I could hardly help myself but run straight back to the compound, forgetting in it's entirety the task I had originally set out to perform. But once returned I immediately made a full reporting of my spectacular incident to Doctor Shelby and the Lieutenant. According to Doctor Shelby I am, to wit, the second human being to ever be so close to a living vampire.

For the rest of the day, as I completed collecting the samples I had originally intended to obtain and began the initial testing I could not help but feel a certain sense of giddy optimism. Not even Doctor Gunterson's usual churlish manner was enough to dent this pleasant sensation.

Commercial

Opening shot of a woman watching the fireplace, camera should be on getting a left rear view with an intimate shot width.

"It's just not the same without Mom and Dad..."

Change to a shot of a man watching the fireplace with the exact same camera angle.

"Well, so long as there's cocoa it's Christmas to me."

Change to a shot of another man watching the fireplace from the same camera angle.

"It's a good thing we can all still get together like this, watching the fire and drinking cocoa..."

Camera shifts back to the girl. The angle is now from far back, slightly higher and to the right of her showing her alone in the room with a laptop playing World of Warcraft and a bluetooth headset in her right ear.

"So what instance are we going to tackle today?"

Play the usual WoW commercial outro without the voice over, just the fading sounds of the sibling's banter.

Trying to get some more written.

Sorry I haven't been posting as much here. I do have a few story ideas floating around that I want to get written up, but lately my pixel art and 3d modeling have been sucking up all my time. I'm also working on UV unwraping my latest model, a process that, I must confess, frustrates me to no end.

With luck, I'll be getting back to writing updates for the blog soon(tm).

Avoiding MMOs

Looking back, I think part of the reason I've been avoiding MMOs lately is just because I don't really want to spend my time organizing people to do things.

It was a good long while ago that I got pretty bored of complaining about stuff all the time and decided to just do things myself. This led to me being more active in trying to organize people to get groups going, running more pick up groups, and just generally being more active in my various guilds. Unfortunately, I just don't have the patience for people, they give me headaches.

So in many ways, more than the game play itself, I'm probably just not wanting to get back into the whole "organizing peoples" side of things.

Monologue 001

"So there I am, it's starring at me, I'm starring at it. Thinking to myself, what the hell, it's just a book. But it's not just a book, it's my inaugural book. For the first time in my life I'm going to be reading a book where the main character is a lez. Not some best friend of the main character, not that mauve shirt who winds up killed off part way through, it's the main event.

Part of me is curious, part of me feels like I'm being bad just looking at it, but either way my hands are reaching for it right now whether I like it or not. So once I have it in my hot little hand I immediately grab something else, something to cover it with. Put on my best cool as you please attitude and head for the librarian feeling like the whole world has got it's eyes on my back. It's just a book, they won't even know what's in it if they haven't read it, and I know that logically I'm right, logically there ain't anything scary about checking out a book. For me, though, it's not just a book, it's proof, it's something that could prove I'm different.

Take it home and read it every spare moment for three days straight, hiding it under the pillow, worrying if it'll be seen. Not a single scene I can't remember in detail, though verbatim dialogue still escapes me. Get to the end and put it down, all that's in my mind is an overwhelming feeling of catharsis. Can't say as the ending wasn't happy, they certainly wound up together, but all that pain along the way, just saps it right out of me. It's like coming face to face with the crushing reality that being different is dangerous, even if they did make it through in the end. Yet at the same time, man, it's the first romance I've ever identified with. Oh I've enjoyed watching straight romance for years and intellectually I got the whole relationships, even felt good for them when they got together. That's not the same as actually identifying with a protagonist though, the sheer emotional weight when you can really understand their feelings.

So I started reading more... well I say more, as such it was only four odd books. Of course I noticed a bit of a common theme by the end of them, by the end of the story, the main character had always been ostracized by their peers. At the time I thought it was terrible, wanted more happy stories. I kind of still do. Yet, since I've been really lonely, a true outcast, I've been stuck more and more with the memories of those stories. There is just something about knowing that someone out there understands, that kind of slight glimmer of hope that maybe they understand what you're going through. Kind of feels warm, and yet still so cold."