Saalon Muyo

What skills should a video game require from a player?

Most games fall into one of a few categories when it comes to what the player has to be able to do in order to be successful. Your old school platform arcade games, and the games that have descended from them, asked nothing more than fast reaction time and good twitch control over your fingers. You see a group of colored pixels coming at you, you decide where you need to be to not get hit and how soon you need to get there and you twitch your thumb on the direction pad or the A-button. If you’re good at it, and you’ve learned the timing of the game, you survive to face more colored pixels. Fail and lose a life.

Then you have your old school RPG and strategy games. On these, your reaction time was nearly or completely irrelevant. Everything happened in turns, and success in combat was determined by predetermined stats and pseudo-random dice rolls. The skills required here are about the same as you need to enjoy a full season of baseball. You know the stats of your characters, of your items, of your enemies and of the terrain and you form a strategy to maximize your numbers and minimize theirs. Do it correctly, and you take power from the dice rolls and receive a higher probability of success. The better you know the game, and the better you are at juggling stats and how they affect each other, the better you do. Put a left handed batter against a right handed pitcher. Or whatever it is people do in baseball.

Finally, you have the Puzzle Games. These games require little to no Twitch Reflexes and often only rudimentary experience with the game mechanics. They’re Sudoku on a computer, and ask their players to use many of the same skills. Minesweeper is timed, but the same good puzzle solving skills that made you good in Memory as a child will make you good here. And don’t think these are just games like Bejeweled. The hoards of Myst-lovers used the same skills, leisurely moving through a sequence of pretty pictures as they tried to determine which levers needed turned in what order.

Modern games, having faster processors, more memory and infinite storage space, tend to mix these skills up a bit. Most Playstation games are essentially twitch games with more strategic number crunching elements mixed in to make your brain work a little bit. Real Time Strategy games like Command & Conquer take away the comfort (and required strategic acumen) from a turn based game like Civilization and add in a need for fast and accurate clicking. But when you get right down to it

For instance, there are the Simulation games, that require some mix of knowledge of the outside world and understanding of how the game’s model of that real world thing works. These games, if they’re built right, only require twitch reflexes or stat crunching unless it’s part of the real world thing being modeled. Compare, for instance, Flight Simulator to X-Wing. X-Wing requires fast reflexes and good hand-eye coordination. Flight Simulator requires you to know how planes work to some degree. This is also true of Sim City, The Sims and Second Life. While these games ask you to learn game mechanics, the idea is that you’re applying some kind of real-world knowledge to the game in order to succeed. Know something about Zoning, and you’ll have a rich city. Manage relationships well and you’ll have a happy Sim. Hone good color coordination and design skills and get lots of cybersex.

Some genres of games know exactly what skills their players should have. One of the most successful of these genres is the First Person Shooter. While there are a handful of sub genres that have their own, unique mechanics, they all work in the same way. You need to both agile and accurate with gun aiming. You have to know what weapons are good in what situations. You have to be good at learning and maneuvering through complicated 3D maps. A person who picks up a good FPS knows exactly what they’re getting into.

Other genres are more confused. None is more confused than the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. People call them MMORPGs. With great reluctance, I’ll call them the same thing. The MMORPG, frankly, has no idea what skills its players should have. It knows its players should have an active credit card to pay for their account. It knows they should have a lot of free time, without which they will progress too slowly to enjoy the game. It also knows its players should be willing to regularly deal with the crippling setbacks its game play model saddles them with. Once the requirements of Financing, Free Time and Saintly Patience have been met, most MMORPGs slap on an ill-thought out mix of Stat Crunching and intermittent Twitch Mechanics for players to learn. When you get right down to it, an MMORPG doesn’t require any real skills at all. If you read an online hint guide telling you exactly what to do in exactly what order, then put the necessary time in, you’ll be successful. And when you’re not successful? Usually that’s something completely random. Oops, I got stunned before I could cast Heal. Death. Lose XP. Run Back To My Body.

(Before going on, can I point out the irony of a game that demands you both to have a regular job to pay for playing the game, and 40+ hours a week in addition to your job to get your money’s worth out of the game? Of course I can.)

I bring all this up as roundabout way of asking what other skills can we expect players to bring to a game that would still let them be fun? An excellent essay (which I can’t find now, but will link here once I do) on MMORPGs suggested the real reason people play them is persistence. Your character lasts from one play session to the next, and retains all experience, items and changes from session to session. In other words, you get to build up a character. The problem is, game designers seem to assume that the numerical progression of statistics increasing and persisting from session to session is all that’s needed; progression of the player’s skills is severely undervalued. A game like Dance Dance Revolution demands a unique set of skills: rhythm and physical coordination. Basically, as you become a better dancer, you become a better player.

Can we add that to an MMORPG? Can we make item creation, magic, combat and exploration more dependent on the player and less dependent on numbers? And can we find a way to portray the player’s increased skill level in the game in some way? And then, having accomplished that, can we tie in-game progression more to player skill than to character levels and item quality, so that speed of learning trumps raw amount of time spent in game?

I have some thoughts on this, and I’m going to get into them in detail in future parts. For now, let’s take a break. Next stop, Aenroth.

In the fall of 2000, one of the season’s new shows caught my eye. Its premise was quirky and strange, it had a theme song by They Might Be Giants and it was being placed on the schedule between the The Simpsons and X-Files. It was a perfect mix. Surely this show would be one of those strange gems, those oddball shows that you bring up in conversations 20 years later to show how cool you are for remembering obscure awesomeness. I thought I was getting the next Adventures of Pete and Pete. What I got was disappointment.

It says a lot about Malcolm in the Middle’s breathtaking mediocrity that its claim to fame is sticking us with Frankie Muniz. For a show about an oddball family dealing with the bizarre side of life, Malcolm in the Middle was awfully tame. There weren’t any moments of inspired madness, nor were there the kind of freakish-but-lovable side characters that make shows like this memorable. In the half season I managed to sit through, Malcolm never rose above the level of Slightly Different. This was the first prime time show to use a They Might Be Giants theme song? We’d been had.

I’m in the minority when it comes to this show. At least, I think I am. The show lasted for something like 6 seasons, so someone had to have been watching it. It’s possible the might of The Simpsons carried it along, or that the show was cheap enough to produce that it did need big ratings to survive. It’s also possible the disturbing pseudo-cuteness of Frankie Muniz was enough of a draw on its own to pull in the required demographics. It’s hard to say.

I have a real fondness for crazy shows. I still talk about that first, truncated season of Eerie, Indiana. I remember my excitement upon learning that Michael Stipe would be appearing in Pete and Pete. Nothing made me happier than a new episode of Ren and Stimpy. At least, back when Ren and Stimpy was pure genius, which was for maybe 6 episodes. Still.

Malcolm in the Middle felt like corporate America hijacking a long tradition of underground, crazy-as-hell television series’ and throwing out everything but the window dressing. It’s not that it was a bad show. It’s just that it wasn’t the show we were promised, even though it never stopped pretending to be that show. When out of their minds writers manage to get their dreams onto the screen for the 8 or 10 episodes it takes a studio to wake up and cancel them, what you get is a sort of magic like nothing else. Malcolm in the Middle may have been funny, but, by getting my hopes up just to sell me out, it left me with a feeling of disappointment I never shook.

Plus it gave us Frankie Muniz.

I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t have the time to go back and look through old posts. I might be giving unnecessary background information. If so, I apologize.

When I started working on the new novel, Sunshine Alley, the first problem I needed to solve was something that had plagued Broken Magic. I don’t do all of my writing on one computer. Sometimes I work on my desktop and sometimes I use the laptop. This isn’t just an “Am I at home or on the road?” thing. I use the laptop at home sometimes when I want to sit with Erin instead of hiding in my office. Also, there are days when things are dead at work and I want to make an edit that’s been on my mind. That’s three computers I need to use to work on one document. The problem is how to make sure I’ve always got the most recent version with me, and how to ensure that the version I think is the most recent actually is.

Recently, Brent got me up to speed on a great version control application called Subversion. For those of you who aren’t programmers, version control programs allow you to keep your source code in a central repository from which items can be checked out of and worked on, then checked back in. It serves two purposes: first, it keeps the most updated code in one place, so you know where the current stuff is. Second, it saves a version of the source at every change, so if you need to go back to an earlier version, you can do so easily.

So I thought, if this works for source code, why not try it with fiction? They’re both just text documents. Just like in coding, occasionally you make a change that you regret, and it would be nice to be able to recover an old version of your document without having to rewrite it by hand and figure out exactly what had been there before and what was new. And this central source thing is something I was basically maintaining by hand with Broken Magic, only I used a Cruzer flash drive that I carried from computer to computer.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and the success I’m having with it is making me feel pretty good. Using Subversion, I’ve been able to keep not only the actual novel document, but all of the notes and character outlines that go with it in one place. No matter where I’m working, as long as I have a computer with Subversion I can get both the novel and my notes in a couple of seconds, do what I need to do, and send the changes back to the server. If I decide that I’ve hit a dead end because the whole chapter I’m writing is garbage, I can delete it completely, giving me a clean slate without worry; I can always get that chapter back if I need to.

I’m sure there are fancier document management utilities out there that do the same thing, but with fancy web front ends and crazy features, but the fact is all I really need is the ability to check out documents and commit changes. That’s it. Subversion gives me simply and easily.

Using Subversion has cleared up one of my biggest headaches when writing. I can write whenever and wherever I want, knowing I’ve got the most current version of my work. Syncing the changes with my other machines is as simple as committing from one machine and checking out from another. I don’t have to think about whether I’m working on the right copy, and I don’t have to keep arcanely named backup copies spread across my hard drive that I’ll just lose track of and be afraid to delete when I find them later.

If you’re working on something that you edit on different computers, try using a source control tool like Subversion. It’s cheaper than the Advil you’ll need when you try to hand-combine two versions of the same document that both have important stuff in them.