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Once upon a time, playing a roleplaying game meant getting together with friends over a table, and having a gamemaster handcraft an experience for you. There is, let me assure those of you who have not had the experience, no sort of gaming so fine as a roleplaying campaign with a first-rate gamemaster, and with friends who are genuinely committed to roleplaying. It is, in its own way, the n'est plus ultra of gaming, the sort of experience you cannot have in any other fashion, direct, and meaningful, and emotionally impactful; more fun, at times, than you can have in any other way, at least with your clothes on.

Since the inception of the digital RPG, tabletop RPGers have been rightfully suspicious of the whole genre; digital RPGs are not, in any meaningful sense, role-playing games. That is to say, you take the part of a single character in an imaginary world, as in a real RPG; but min-maxing, and winning, is your objective, and actually getting into to the role of someone unlike yourself, and acting and speaking as your character would, is way beyond the point.

MMOs get a little closer; it's at least possible to separate yourself from the level grind for a moment or two, and actually engage in repartee with others. Yet there's a big difference; a canny gamemaster rewards this, but there are no in-game rewards, in an MMO, for anything other than the level grind. An actual conversation from my EverQuest experience:

Some Dude: Yo! Bitch! Gimme buffs.
Me: Sirrah! Dost thou address a lady thus?
Some Dude: Why you gotta talk that way?
Me: If you don't want that, why are you playing on a roleplaying server? (And unsaid but thought: Schmuck.)

Yet in another way, the difference between a tabletop GM and an MMO (or a digital RPG) is, in essence, the difference between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter. For several thousand dollars, even today, you can have a tailor make you a suit, carefully hand-made to your dimensions. Or, for several hundred dollars, you can buy one off the rack -- in the argot of couture, prêt à porter, meaning "cash and carry," the English idiom being "ready to wear." It won't be as sleek, it won't fit you quite as well, but it will be adequate, and a whole lot cheaper.

Tabletop roleplaying is, in essence, bespoke gamemastering; a person who knows you, and your gaming group well, is carefully structuring an experience for your pleasure. Naturally, there are good and bad GMs, just as their are good and bad tailors, but an effort is being made to create an individual experience.

MMOs are, to coin a phrase, prêt à jouer (ready to play): a faceless company far away has spent a great deal of time and effort creating a scalable experience suitable for large numbers of people, and infinitely replicable, in the hope that a sufficiently large mass audience will find it sufficiently appealing to pay their ten bucks a month, or whatever. An MMO is ever and always a pretty unsatifying gamemaster, from the perspective of a tabletop player -- and yet, it's always there, and doesn't rely on you gathering a bunch of friends for a session, and even if it isn't great, it's usually -- adequate.

Of course, tabletop gamemasters, unlike bespoke tailors, have not been able to turn what they do into a profitable enterprise. With some rare exceptions (mystery party weekends, corporate roleplaying exercises), no one has been able to establish a market for bespoke GMing -- and so gamemastering remains, as it has always been, something GMs do for their own entertainment and egoboo, and for the entertainment of their friends. More's the pity; good GMs are priceless, and in a perfect world, they should be able to extract a price.

But the distinction here suggests another route: Between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter we have something else: Designer clothing. Many people are unwilling to pay the price required for bespoke tailoring (or, on the feminine side, haute couture), and yet are willing to pay a premium over commodity clothing for the sake of a designer label. To be sure, in some cases, this is merely a matter of slapping some celebrity's label on clothing that would otherwise be considered a commodity; yet in principle, and in many cases, it's something of a compromise between individual exclusivity and mass-market dross. At least in some cases, designer clothing is an expression of individual creativity, designed to appeal to a narrower market than the mass.

Can we find a similar middle ground in gaming?

I think perhaps we can -- and I'll suggest several places where we may see it emerging.

1. Some of the larger Scandinavian LARPs--while remaining non-profit entities--now employ people, part- or full-time to plan for the next major event.
2. ARGs and "big urban" games like those created by area/code games are hand-crafted, short-term experiences for a limited, if still large, audience.
3. Companies like GoCrossCampus are using a standard rules-set, but hand-crafting experiences for large numbers of people in environments with definable end-games.

None of this is exactly big business -- today. And yet I wonder whether there's something viable between bespoke GMing and the bland facelessness of MMOs -- the roleplaying equivalent of the Designer Label.

Well, we've been working on a new business plan, and I think perhaps it's time to go public with it. Click here for the investor presentation.

I wrote Fatherhood partially in response to your (Greg Costikyan's) earlier essays on games-as-art. In particular, the "game's criticism" article strikes home to me. I wanted to make a game that withstood criticism by possessing more than a surface layer of messages. We've all seen or read over-analysis of games that read meaning that likely was never intended: support for communism read into Super Mario Brothers, for example. There are also games that make their agenda clear, Hidden Agenda as an example. Or games, that while the specific agenda might be unclear, are so simple that one is left no choice but to try and look for a higher reason to explain the existence of the game -- Passage falls into this category.

My goal with Fatherhood was to make a game with an agenda, but not let that agenda control the game. The Catch-22 I've put myself in is that I do not think it is necessarily right for me to explain my agenda -- that would seem to defeat the whole purpose of wrapping a game around it. But, then, what to do if the agenda is completely missed by those who play it? One interpretation is that the author is dead -- if the readers miss the agenda, the agenda does not exist. But, perhaps, it does exist, but is operating at a subconscious level not picked up readily?

All this text leads to this simple conclusion. I will explain what game mechanics I added that were motivated around achieving my underlying message, along with said message.

Goal of the Game: Transmit the feeling of "Fatherhood" to players. Since Fatherhood is hardly a simple emotion that could be captured in a seven day roguelike, I picked two simple aspects. One is discipline. The second is being a role model.

Discipline is a very difficult task. The implementation in Fatherhood is through three commands: praise, scold, and talk. My philosophy is inspired from two sources. A GDC presentation (I think in '99?) by a psychologist who trained inch-worms hammered home the point that positive reinforcement is superior to negative reinforcement. She also addressed the other question: why is this so counter-intuitive? The answer is that negative reinforcement produces immediate results while positive reinforcement doesn't. In Fatherhood, if you scold your children, they will immediately return to rock piling. If you praise them while rock piling, however, there is no immediate result -- they still will break off to play tag. However, repeated scolding will result in children that only briefly rock-pile before they revert to running around and playing tag -- they learn that this pattern gains them the most attention. Repeated praise will instead lock them into rock piling -- while they enjoy tag, they prefer the attention of their parent. The underlying game mechanic is intentionally simple. Children seek the activity that maximizes attention (or, if another child has received more attention than them, they ape that child's behavior). Both scolding and praise count as attention -- however, the attention is applied to the activity they were performing when the scold/praise was applied. Thus, scolding a tag playing child teaches them that tag will gain attention, while praising a rock piler teaches them that rock piling will gain attention.

The third form of communication, talking, is implemented in response to ... ack, I don't have the book on hand. In any case, the key insight was the comment that whenever you find yourself saying "How many times do I have to tell you?" you should have a red flag go up that you've already told them too many times. Children are quite capable of understanding the first time, but, if given the chance to feign ignorance, they'll happily lead you to talking for hours rationalizing and re-rationalizing your arguments. As such, the "talk" command is wired up to do nothing.

Now the second agenda: being a role model. There are many, obvious, positive aspects to being a role model. However, the tough part is the realization that they are always watching you. You only have to goof-off and portray an unsafe action once for them to pick up on it and emulate it themselves. This is governed by how the children behave around the natural dangers. By default, they do not travel very close to the water or fire - they will keep a fixed number of squares away. However, whenever they have line of sight to you, they will check how close *you* have gotten to the water and update their own safe distances to correspond. This means that if you walk next to the water the kids will also be willing to walk next to it, which can lead to drowning if the water decides to advance that tick.

I had hoped that the high-score mechanism would encourage people to try and win by saving more farmland/forest. In my
play testing, to do real aggressive stopping of the flood/fire you need the help of your children. Maybe I just need to make the goal of increasing the score more clear so people don't see it as necessarily complete when they merely stop the flood/fire.

my blog is actually over here...

http://pluckypixels.blogspot.com

In a recent comment, miwi asked what game design books I would recommend.

All have flaws, but three I think worth reading are:

Game Design, by Bob Bates (long time designer back into the InfoCom days) -- light on theory, but strong on practicality.

Game Design: Theory and Practice, by Richard Rouse -- a little heavier going, but smart and informative.

Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton -- less focussed than the previous too, but more willing to encourage experimentation.

And three that are not directly about game design, but worth reading for what they are:

Rules of Play, by Salen and Zimmerman; somewhat academic, and heavy going, but a strong introduction to design from a game studies perspective.

Theory of Fun, by Raph Koster; idiosyncratic, but thought-provoking.

Patterns in Game Design, by Bjork and Holopainen -- very dull, and tough sledding, but think of it as a laundry list of a huge number of different game mechanics. As an exercise, it's worth flipping the book over to three different pages, and thinking about how you'd create a game using those three concepts as core.

Your mileage may vary.

In an intentionally provocative essay at The Escapist, Roger Travis attack game studies as a very concept. He seems not to understand what he's attacking, though, despite carefully chosen quotes from Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. His claim is that "scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture," and he begins by quoting Douglas Wilson as saying "I hate gamers."

Now, I am a gamer. I've been a gamer since before many of our readers were born, since I was, in the 70s, a board wargamer, the very people who coined the neologism, the first proud game geeks. So it would amount to self-loathing for me to say something like "I hate gamers." Yet there is no doubt that most gamers are plug-ignorant about games. Oh, they may know WoW instances like the back of their hand, or know every spot to snipe from on all the major Counter-Strike maps, but they often know very little about the historical evolution of our field, about the process of development, about the thinking of game designers, about the creatively important people in the medium, or indeed much of anything except the narrow range of genres that they themselves follow.

This is less true of other popular arts; movie fans are typically far more knowledgeable about cinematic technique, the nature of movie-making, the personalities involved, and the history of the medium.

And there's no question that the ignorance of gamers has pernicious effects: they lap up the same old goods repackaged with "IV" on the box, they mistake graphic trickery for advances in the state of the art, they conflate story with design, they push genres toward grognard capture. In a word they are (or many of them are) vidiots.

I have argued in the past that much of the artistic arteriosclerosis we see in today's game industry is due to a combination of Moore's Wall and publisher philistinism -- and that's no doubt true. But most gamers' ignorance of our form, and their lack of aesthetic breadth, compounds the problem.

And I've argued, as well, that disrupting the existing business model, with its relentless focus on best-sellers and unwillingness to fund creative risks, is essential to preserve the field's creative health, and our legacy of innovation; that's true, doubtless, but the other side of the equation is that we need to change gamer culture, to make gamers smarter about games.

Luckily, this is far from a lost cause; it's happening. It's happening in a lot of different ways; one example of how it's happening is, of course, The Escapist, which addresses games at an intellectual level almost unheard of in the game press of days past. But you can see it happening, too, in the level of creativity shown in student projects, in the increasing publication of books about games at every level, in the increasing diversity and level of innovation shown in games at the IGF. This website, too is, in its own modest way, an attempt to push the dialog a little farther, to cast light on interesting games outside of the mainstream -- because the mainstream is now so relentlessly focussed on a handful of genres that innovation, and a broader aesthetic, can only be found elsewhere.

One of the main reasons gamers are becoming more sophisticated, however, is, well, game studies.

Not that many gamers are ever going to read Cybertext or Game Studies; nor need they. But as the ideas expressed by scholars percolate through their students and those who read their work, they spread out into the community of gamers. Ten years ago, if I'd used phrases like "reward schedule" or "resource management" or "player skill vs. character skill" in conversation, I would almost certainly have had to explain what I meant; today, many, though not all, gamers would know what I meant without explanation.

Similarly, ten years ago, if you went looking for anything that talked about game design from a theoretical perspective, about all you'd find would be Chris Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design and one of my essays. Today, you can find hundreds of essays, and scores of books -- and yes, that's a good thing, because theory does make for better design (or if it doesn't, it's not very good theory).

The idea, in fact, that game studies is somehow antipathetic to gamers, or game culture, is absurd on the face of it; game studies is, rather, a natural evolution of game culture, a recognition by the academy that games, and game culture, are now sufficiently important enough to be worthy of, and to repay, study. And since gamers, or the more sophisticated among them, are among the natural audience for the products of game studies, game studies helps to inform game culture -- and, I believe, modify it for the better.

(Also see Ian Bogost's riposte to Travis's article.)

I'm going to call this a "design document," but it's really not. This is me jotting down some notes about a game idea I had in a rough style, so a.) I don't loose them, and b.) so I can get some opinions.

And yes, I do realize the similarity to "The Butterfly Effect." I've never actually seen that film, but numerous people have pointed out the similarities to me. I don't particularly care.

This is not a PTT article or anything, though I am working om something. This is just an idea I had, and I needed somewhere to put it, and I figured this was probably the best place.

---

...according to Game Daily. Reading between the lines, they apparently feel that exhibiting at E3 was the main benefit of membership, and don't want to bother any more.

This will create a minor problem for the Independent Games Festival; one of the criteria for eligibility has long been that your game may not be published by an ESA member. They'll have to figure out some other wording to exclude games from such major publishers.

Last Friday and Saturday, I was in Troy, New York, at the 2008 Game Festival & Symposium at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Like the SCAD conference I reported on a couple of weeks ago, this is a university-run meeting, with speakers from industry, and with mostly students in attendance. Michael Lynch met me at the Albany train station, and squired me about.

Friday night was the "festival" portion, with students showing off their final projects, some of which were quite impressive, for undergraduate games created over a single semester; staff from Vicarious Visions, a local developer (and now an Activision studio) were on hand to judge them, with the top 5 receiving small cash prizes at the end of the conference. (For what it's worth, I agreed with them on what constituted the top five, but would have ranked them differently.)

The theme of the conference was 'serious games,' though the RPI program is not particularly geared to such.

The first speaker on Saturday was Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria, creator of the McDonald's Game, Operation Pedopriest, and Faith Fighter; he expressed the thought that we can really only hope to understand the modern world as a congeries of dynamic systems with emergent properties, that games are by nature dynamic systems with emergent properties, and that game developers ought to be working to grapple more immediately with real-world issues, and can thereby offer insight into matters of importance. Later on, in conversation, he chastised me for mentioning him by name in these pages, and in particular in association with his games: "I get death threats every day," he said. And I believe him, and perhaps will be more circumspect in future; yet it's hard not to acknowledge one of our most courageous and interesting auteurs in the chancy area of 'games for change.'

Next up were Paul Tarini and Dwayne Proctor of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major heath-care non-profit, who were among the funders of Re-Mission; they talked about some of their game-related efforts, and also about their huge (half a billion dollar) commitment to reversing the trend toward childhood obesity in this country, and games' potential contribution to the effort.

After lunch, I spoke on the topic of Design for Serious Games: Why So Many Suck and How to Design Ones that Don't. (Link is to presentation, a tad over a meg in size.)

Following was a panel discussion with three RPI graduates who now all work for First Playable in Troy, and seem delighted to do so. They also praised the many virtues of working for a small studio--a bit of a one-sided discussion, really.... here's one example of why this isn't so rosy, and of course here's my bitter screed on the subject.

Eric Zimmerman was the last speaker of the day; he tried to combine one of his patented (and rousing) lectures on game design with a pitch for Gamestar Mechanic and a plea for creativity in design, and basically ran out of time -- any one of the three would probably have sufficed in its own right. But he's always fun to listen to.

Finally, Karthik Bala of Vicarious Visions (not incidentally an RPI alum) presented the awards for the Festival.

Eric and I took the train back to the city together; I nodded off, and he played Astral Tournament.

What I found interesting, and heartening, about the experience was something I also took away from the SCAD conference: as game development programs spread through academia, they are not, as you might first expect, becoming primarily vocational ventures to train people in the skills required of them by the conventional industry, but do seek to inculcate a design sensibility, an impulse to innovation, and an appreciation for the historical development of the field. We may at least hope that, just as Cahier du Cinema and the rise of film studies led to a creative renaissance in film, academic attention to games may do likewise in our own field.

In yesterday's review, I originally contrasted "the feminine sensibilities of casual gamers" with the "aesthetic of real gamers," until I was chastised by Emily Short, of one our reviewers, and modified the latter to "core gamers." But this got me thinking, and I want to explore that a bit more -- partially, to be sure, to justify myself as someone who is not fundamentally a chauvinist schmuck, but I think more importantly, to explore, and perhaps seek to erase, the distinction between "gamers" and "game players."

When I were a lad, these long years ago, toiling up the steep Bronx hills in snow and sleet toward my dismal high school, the only people who called themselves "gamers" were, like me and at most a hundred thousand others, players of geeky board wargames with hexes and thousands of words of rules and little die-cut cardboard counters covered with numbers. We were the first flower of what has now become a subculture that includes virtually every adolescent male, a substantial number of adolescent females, and a portion of every demographic group under 40, those exposed to games of various kinds in their youth, and who continue to consider themselves "gamers" -- it's part of who we are.

To be a "gamer" is to mean that you consider your love of games, and your propensity to play them, at least one component of your identify. Few gamers are gamers alone, of course; most of us are atheists or Methodists, liberals or libertarians, New Yorkers or Kansans, gay or straight, polyamorists or family men. But just as some people identify as "readers," and some as "film buffs," we consider ourselves "gamers."

Yet the play of games extends far beyond the community of gamers: we are all, or almost all, gamers now, in some sense. Some of us play games like Bejewelled or Diner Dash, and never make a connection between our occasional light entertainment and the medium that produces things like Grand Theft Auto IV, and indeed may continue to hold the conventional attitude to such games (violent! bad! kids should be outside playing!) without experiencing a moment of intellectual discontinuity when we fire up Bejewelled for another bit of match-3 relaxation. Some of us play Hearts, or Spades or Klondike solitaire on the Windows Games menu, without any understanding that the modern medium of games derives from such folk games by direct, linear evolution. Some of us do the crossword daily, or while idle moments away with Sudoku, or enjoy logic puzzles but would be puzzled by the idea that we might find the same enjoyment in Portal or Eets.

And that's a crying shame--on both sides of the equation.

It's a shame that so many people who enjoy some kind of game are unwilling to consider exposure to games beyond the narrow range of those they enjoy, because we live in what will no doubt, in the future, be considered the era of the greatest innovation, experiment, and exploration in games, the era in which games came into their own as sublime products of the human soul, a form of art capable of standing proudly even with those forms acknowledged by the ancient Greeks. But of course, the same can be said of every other artform; there are fans of romance, or noir, or space opera, who want nothing more than to sink into the comforting embrace of another work with the characteristics of others they have loved, without any desire to explore the larger realms of literature. Nonetheless, by seeking out the familiar, they are blinding themselves to experiences that could expand their horizons.

On the other side, it's a shame that for so many gamers, "games" equally mean what they are familiar with. Line extentions sell, people spend years and even decades obsessed with the likes of Counter-Strike and WoW without lifting their heads to see the wider horizon, and the conventional industry continue to narrow its focus down to a handful of genres and styles of play. Gamers, too, would benefit by noticing the enormous variety of games, and our proud, multi-century history of innovation and expansion, and perhaps by noticing the paucity of expression that currently plagues the conventional industry.

"We are all gamers now" is perhaps exaggeration; doubtless, somewhere there is someone who has never handled a deck of cards, or tossed dice, or held a controller, or paid any attention to Window's games folder -- yet those who have must be a small, and decreasing, portion of the population. But it is undoubtedly true that many people who play games -- indeed, many people for whom games of one kind or another are a vital and important part of their leisure-time activities -- do not consider themselves "gamers" and never will.

Not everyone who watches movies considers themselves a cineaste, and not everyone who picks up a novel from time to time considers themselves a reader -- there's no shame in that. And yet -- what would the world be like if the millions who play casual games enthusiatically considered themselves "gamers," and the millions of FPS and RTS and MMO enthusiasts acknowledged Chess and Bejewelled and Hearts and Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and Monopoly as equally legitimate?

Let us break down the artificial barriers that separate us. We are all gamers now. And we are all participants in an artistically exhilarating venture, a culturally important enterprise -- the creation of a new medium, a new form of art, based not on humanity's story-telling impulse, but instead on our instinct to play.