This is a nice blog anniversary surprise!

I don’t know for how long, or why (maybe the publisher stuff is sorted out? Maybe someone found a cache of them hidden under a mossy rock north of Pirate Cove) — but it’s claims 1-3 weeks shipping time, and it’s $17.24, and it’s not used copies. As you may or may not know, it’s been out of print since last October or so, and copies have been going for as high as $300.

If you’ve been waiting, now might be the time to order it!

Theory of Fun for Game Design @ Amazon

BTW, if any current owners want to review it, it could use some fresh reviews…

Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”

Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).

It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed.

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Testing the Limits of Single-Player is a cool article by Jason Rohrer which messes around specifically with the game grammatical notion of the “opponent” — basically, questioning the boundaries of single-player games, and how deep they can be, compared to multiplayer games. It’s interesting because it not only explores it from a design theory point of view, but then goes on to offer up a game prototype exploring the issues. Very cool.

The two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer (IMHO):

• Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything — the bare rules, bare mechanics, bare actions, stats, feedback loops. The skeleton, the core, the bone and sinew of it, without any dressing, as a shifting, moving mechanical construct of guy wires and rigid struts. It’s not an attack, it’s force projection, it’s territory control in a graph. And you can see it in your head, and when a feature gets proposed, you can see where it slots in — or not, and know whether the whole construct will tip over.

• Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play — to approach it as a user experience, the magical moment of immersion, the confusion, the dazzle and colors, the sheer sense of possibility and play. The skin, the surface, the way the music will swell when you step through that door, the way that moving will FEEL, the way the possibilities unfold. To know where someone would be confused, to know where they will be led, to see the whole construct as an innocent.

And a great designer? They should be able to see both in their head at once.

Video has been posted of the “All the World’s a Game” panel at Supernova from a few weeks back. (I previously blogged about a summary written by The UpTake Blog). Now you too can see the arguments over dorodango…

At this point, everyone is talking about the Age of Conan issue with DPS. In short, they tied doing damage to a trigger in the animation sequence, which meant that slower animations would do damage at a different rate than faster ones. And all the female combat anims are slower, so all the female characters do less damage per second.

From a game grammar point of view, this is a clear example of getting the wrong end of the stick. Recall the distinctions between the “salad” and the “dressing” of a game — the “salad” is the actual game, and it can be represented in many different ways.

In particular, you can certainly take the typical MMO combat game, even the realtime varieties, and model the game proper with cards, dice, or numeric outputs. In fact, hardcore players often do the latter in order to analyze how they are doing, because it’s easier to run statistical analysis on text logs than on 3d graphics.

As I have said before, if you get the “salad” right, then the dressing — the storyline, art, music, characters, setting, theme — can only serve to enhance. Start with the experience design, and if your core is rotten or an afterthought, you’ll be putting lipstick on a pig.

Folks working on teams tend to push for the primacy of their own discipline, and these days, with so many games being primarily about experience design and not about game design, it’s easy to put experience design at a higher priority than the mechanics. An animator is not going to want to be told that his carefully crafted ten second animation may be sped up and played in one second. He will rightly point out that a human being making a motion in one second versus ten stands very differently, and distributes weight in a different way, and that therefore the animation.

But the only reason to do the animation in the first place is to convey that the action happened. It is a piece of systemic feedback, comparable to turning a Magic card 90 degrees, or tipping over the king in a game of chess. You might as well light up a green light over the stick figure’s head. For that matter, the question of whether or not the character is female or not is also purely an aesthetic choice. They could be red or black checkers and play the same.

Just yesterday, I was commenting that there are two rare and vital skills a game designer needs to acquire: the ability to see the game in their head with no dressing at all; and then the ability to see the game in their head with no mechanics at all, as a player sees it.

I love the serendipity factor of the Internet. Right after I post the last post on whether players know what they want, I see that Richard at QBlog has a ranked list of survey results from players on what they said they wanted in their muds back in 1985. Here’s a sampling:

Intelligent mobiles 25
Conversing with mobiles 22
Regularly improved 19
Messages to pick up later 15
Lots of rooms 14
Lots of players 11
Speed of response 10
Long textual descriptions 9
Never crashes 9
International game 6
Built-in adverts -3
Graphics -3

Check the link for the full list.

There has been a lot of criticism towards the game industry, accusing them of being unoriginal. Sequels, sequels, everywhere. Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, GTA 4, Halo 3, The Sims 3, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, not to mention the annual versions of various sports games. Why can’t game companies be more original? Because game companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, making the games that players want, and the players don’t want original games.

— Tobold’s MMORPG Blog: Follow the money

If I say to you, “do you want chocolate ice cream?” you probably say yes. If I say to you “do you want more chocolate ice cream, this time with sprinkles on top?” you probably still say yes.

If I say “by the way, there’s also this mango sorbetto,” you may or may not try it. But you aren’t going to ask for mango sorbetto without prior knowledge of its existence.

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As part of the ongoing raking over the coals of Richard Bartle for saying the obvious (yes, you can tell what side I am on in those debates!), Steve Danuser says over at Moorgard.com » Sacred Cows

I get tired of people implying that today’s MMOs owe their entire existence to the MUDs of yesteryear. Sorry, I disagree. The gameplay style of EQ or WoW is obviously influenced by MUDs, but I propose that MMOs would have evolved anyway.

And Ryan Shwayder posts in comments saying

Ultima Online is a direct descendant of what MUD? I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying that I don’t know what particular MUD had a profound influence on that game. It seems like the MMO industry was born of different influences; EverQuest from DikiMuds, Ultima Online from Ultima games. Not all MMOs have a lot of direct comparisons to MUDs, so I think he’s right that they’d exist whether MUDs did or not.

Well…

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Let’s say you were wealthy and lived in New York City, and hired an arhcitect to redo your new apartment. And you dropped a single, small hint that you liked playfulness — that you wanted a poem you had written for your kids to be embedded in the wall somewhere.

A whole year later, you realized that what the architect gave you was an apartment that was an adventure game, rich and deep with fiction and characters and mysteries…

In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

If there is any justice in the world, this apartment should be preserved as a museum and as a testament to human creativity.