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Massively posted an interesting story last week about people in EVE Online’s volunteer program misusing privileged information. In this case it was connected with getting information (such as IP addresses) about the other volunteers, but it does point to one of the big issues with any kind of volunteer service in MMOs.

Games have often used volunteers as extra unpaid GMs, or to help coordinate other players, to mentor newbies or write newbie guides, or help support the community in other ways. These volunteers are drawn from the player base. So in a game like EVE, what’s to stop a player from using their volunteer powers to help their own character or faction in game?

In some ways it’s smart metagaming to grab as much power and knowledge as possible for yourself in any way possible, including by schmoozing people via out of game channels, buying gold, volunteering to GM for personal in game gains, etc. If volunteers were elected, you could imagine a player organising a huge election campaign with the hidden intent of supporting their own faction after the election. Just like real life, really. And just like in real life, unchecked metagaming leads to corruption in the game world.

But metagaming also leads to a huge increase in immersion. It may not be a good influence on either the game or the player base but it really does benefit players who get into their characters, even outside the game. EVE flaunts the fact that players have the freedom to join enemy corps with the intent to betray them. Is that metagaming? Well, if you lie to your corps mates on a regular basis then you’re probably playing a different game than they are. A con game, in fact. (From watching Hustle, I now know that this is known as playing the inside man in a long con – who said TV never teaches you anything useful? ). Is EVE supposed to be a game about con artists? Well, it is now.

Allowing, or even encouraging, some metagaming is a dangerous road to walk. Some people will always take it too far. If the worst that happens is one player stealing another guild’s bank or getting a list of volunteer IPs, then you have dodged the bullet. Wait till people start committing RL crimes due to unrestrained metagaming, or harrassment, or being driven to distress or even suicide. We’re at the thin end of the wedge, and I am concerned about how having increased social networking and increased continuous access to MMOs is going to affect metagaming in future.

We need solid anti-corruption rules, proper complaint channels, and watchdogs both in game and out to keep players in line. For their own sakes.

The Problem with Volunteers

It is always tempting to volunteers to use their additional powers to help themselves, even if they do it unintentionally. I remember back in DaoC, there was a volunteer network who assisted GMs. If you just happened to have one of those volunteers in your guild, you never had to wait long for a GM to come assist when you hit a raid bug. The volunteers (and we all knew their characters even though it was supposed to be secret) had the equivalent to a GM hotline.

When I was running a MUSH, all the staff were volunteers and many were drawn from the player base. One of their roles was to arbitrate disputes between players – it was hard for some people to be fair when their friends were involved, or even their own characters. We needed to think up rules to stop that and allow other players to ask for a different judge, without compromising the in game identity of our judges because they wanted to play also.

We took the blunt instrument approach. Initially, no players were also allowed to be judges, we had to recruit our staff from other MUSHes. It actually worked well, but if you don’t let staff play at all then they lose a lot of insight into what’s actually going on in game. Instead they just hear it from the whiniest players. So we relented and let them have player characters, but limited their power. So the most powerful and influential characters never would be staff alts. It helped and people were mostly happy.

You can still never entirely prevent people from wanting to help their friends or other people from abusing their knowledge of who the staff alts are in game. And that was more of an issue in a MUSH because the player base wasn’t that huge. In an MMO, you could just restrict a GM from dealing with anything coming from the server on which they played instead.

I’m not entirely sure what sort of policies current MMOs have about how their staff deal with in game issues. I assume they encourage their staff to play for the same reason that we eventually relented on that issue – it’s the best possible way to understand what’s going on in game, plus encourages staff to make the stuff they want to play themselves. But woe betide the game such as EVE that thrives on metagaming when one of the staff wants to play that game also; they have to consciously restrict themselves from doing what a regular player could do or else be open to (totally justified) claims of corruption from the player base.

The sad thing is that volunteers can add so much to a game. They’re already fans. And there is a section of the player base that genuinely enjoys entertaining other players. They’re the people who would be GMs in tabletop games; not quite designers but not quite players either. In MMOs they probably now take the roles of guild leaders or raid leaders, and in that capacity are doing a thankless task without which the games would be far far less fun for everyone else.

And many of those volunteers would be utterly selfless in using extra volunteer powers for good. It’s just safer for everyone if they don’t get the chance.

Yesterday, I laid out a high leevel overview of a simplified way of tackling disguises and name aliases. Now following the flowchart in yesterday’s post, we’ll build up our Memotica diagram:

1 – The facial recognition part needs to be resolved first. Since the first step is determining whther the face is noticed, we’ll create a numeric condition for that and call it CharacterFaceNoticed. We’ll make it such that if the “Perception” value of the observer is greater than the arbitrary value of 10, then the character’s face was noticed.

2 – We’ll create a second condition called CharacterDisguiseSeenThrough. We’ll be lazy and say that this condition is fulfilled when the “Perception” value of the observer is greater than the arbitrary value of 50. This allows us to re-use the condition argument for checking perception.

3 – The hardest to resolve stimulus is CharacterFaceNormal, since the face must be noticed and the disguise must be seen through. It will be tried first as it has the highest priority. It must meet the requirements of both conditions above, so we’ll wrap them both into a condition set called CharacterFaceDisguisedSeenThrough_CS, which has the AND operator. What this operator means is that both child conditions must be true for the parent to be true. If it was OR, then if either was true, the set would be true and if it is NOT, then neither should be true in order for the set to be true. Strictly speaking, since both conditions are using the same attribute on Observer, only the more stringent is needed. We could do away with the set and use CharacterDisguiseSeenThrough for the same effect, but we want to demonstrate a set here. The three memes to the left of CharacterFaceDisguisedSeenThrough_CS collectively form a namespace wrapper.

4 – If CharacterDisguiseSeenThrough is unresolved, we’ll fall to CharacterFaceDisguised. This uses CharacterFaceNoticed directly.

5 – Lastly, with the lowest priority, comes CharacterFaceUnnoticed. Its condition (a condition is always required with a conditional stimulus) is Memotica.True, which is a dummy condition that is always true.

6 – These three stimuli are of course linked off a single conditional stimulus as only one can be displayed at a time.

7- Lastly we’ll add a few additional sets of aliases. Let’s presume that our character uses two different aliases in each the disguised and undisguised modes. Knowledge of the Aliases is independent of one another. The observer may know one, both or none. The two disguise aliases have CharacterFaceDisguised as an anchor, so that stimulus must be resolved for them to be resolved. The normal aliases are anchored on CharacterDisguiseSeenThrough.

The total ensemble looks thusly.

The forum poster topozan started a thread on the MMOPRGmaker.com the other day that made me think. The issue was about hard coded character names; the floaty names above characters’ heads that are nearly ubiquitous. This is often the source of gripes by roleplayers; mostly because people can’t help but metagame them. Common gripes include people knowing names before being told to becoming extra suspicious about disguise attempts to plain old fashioned acting differently when they know that there is a PC around instead of the NPCs that they usually ignore. (one could turn this last one on its head and ask why players are so prone to metagaming NPCs as furniture)

To get names “right”, we have to contend with several issues:

• If I introduce myself as bob to another character and bump into that character again, it is reasonable for that player to see “Bob” floating above my character.
• If I’m wearing a mask, it is not reasonable for him to see “Bob”. If I remove the mask, he should recognize me.
• What about if I’m wearing a mask, but I’m also wearing distinctive clothing? That guy is the mask is probably Bob.
• What about if that character tells a third character my name?
• What about nicknames and aliases? How many people do you know by nicknames or short forms and were surprised to find out their real, full names?
• What if you “know” the disguised variant as one person under one name and the undisguised version under a different name?
• What if you recognize the face, but don’t know the name?
• And so on…

We actually have two separate levels of information in the above example. First, the observer will have to notice the character in the first place. When I mean “notice”; what I actually mean is notice more than . In real life, this depends on many factors. In a crowd, we are likely not to notice the people we don’t know and may even miss ones we know. If the observer is busy or daydreaming, the likelihood of noting the facial features of strangers or recognizing friends goes down. Distance plays a role. Lastly, physical attractiveness. An attractive woman is certainly much more likely to be noticed by either gender. For our example, let’s take the least complicated approach and lump everything into “observer perceptiveness”. Then there is the question of knowing the name of the person you recognize. The logic flow of facial recognition to name association looks something like the chart below:

We can accomplish this fairly easily with Memotica stimuli. Our character is represented by an Agent entity. One of the child memes of the meme Memotica.Agent is Memotica.StimulusChoice. The Memotica.StimulusChoice is a device for allowing us to attach any number of stimuli to an agent. Each StimulusChoice has any number of Memotica. ConditionalStimulus members. The ConditionalStimulus in turn contains a condition/stimulus pair. In plain English, if the condition is met, then the stimulus is broadcast to the observer. ConditionalStimulus tests are evaluated in order of their declared priority, with the one that is first valid being the one sent to the observer. In Memotica parlance, checking stimulus condition and encoding it in an appropriate manner for the observer’s client technology is called “resolving” the stimulus.

We have two separate levels of stimuli in our example. Since the alias of an agent is dependent on the observer recognizing her and then associating that recognition with a name, we’ll need to process this in two phases. Fortunately, Memotica gives us a tool for doing this. A stimulus may be given an anchor. A stimulus with an anchor requires that other stimulus to be resolved before it can even be checked. You might want to do this in the case of resolving different meshes as stimuli; such as whether an agent is seen as a little girl or a demon by the observer. In this case, the texture would be dependent on which mesh was chosen. In our example, the name alias of the agent is dependent on the choice of recognition level: anonymous, fooled by disguise and real person noted.

In tomorrow’s episode, we’ll build the Memotica diagrams.

Tesh wrote an insightful post discussing why daydreaming about what a game might turn out to be like can be the best part of gaming. We all have our ideal types of games, our ideal IPs or genres, our ideals of what a game could be like to capture our hearts. And sometimes we love our favourite games because they’re a shadow of the game in our minds.

I see this a lot with early adopters of MUDs/virtual worlds/MMOs. These things started before the internet was really mature. Wandering around in a game and encountering an actual real person (well, behind the text) was exciting just because this kind of virtual life was such a new experience. And your imagination filled in all the rest. Even without formal roleplaying, the fact that all you knew about the other person was what you could tell about their character was very very immersive.

I’ve also seen a few posts recently about the notion of a RP-centric MMO. Wolfshead in particular posts about his ideal of a RP game. The concept of this terrifies me on several different levels, and I’m a dyed-in-the-wool roleplayer. I have played RP-centric online games, and they were fantastic. Also dreadful. But that’s what happens when you are so dependent on other players for the experience, you get a mixed bag

But if you see his post as describing the dream, unsullied by practical considerations (such as players acting like players), then it reads in a different light. After all, without a vision, we’ll never get anything better than the games we currently have.

There are some specific issues with making roleplaying work as the entire basis for a game.

1. Who watches the watchmen

The big difference between a tabletop game and an online game is the lack of a GM. In tabletop, one player assumes the GM role and ‘runs’ the game for the other 2-5 players. In virtual roleplaying, the players run things themselves. So there is no one to arbitrate when they come into conflict.

The GM actually has three roles in a tabletop game. One is to describe the world to the players (ie. we open the door, what do we see?). Another is to resolve conflicts in game (ie. I try to hide behind the door, can I get there before he sees me?). And the third is to weave a story around the player group and whatever they are doing.

In a computer game, no one needs to describe anything (this is the HUGE advantage of the virtual world), and players can tell their own stories, even if they aren’t particularly good ones.

But who resolves conflicts between players? Who decides if player cop #1 can track down player thief #2?

Any game like this needs to give players the tools to resolve their own conflicts. Random rolling isn’t good enough – it removes too much of the game if you just randomly decide whether the cop catches the robber.

2. So what is my motivation?

You don’t need to be an award winning actor to roleplay but players need to share some kind of common understanding about the game world. When you walk into a room, you need to be able to answer the question, “what does my character do next?” If someone addresses you in character, you need to be confident enough to answer them.

I’ll give an example of this: In EQ2 I had created a dark elf alt and done a couple of quests. It was on a roleplaying server so it wasn’t really surprising when another higher level player came up to me and addressed me in character. Except he mentioned names of (presumably) NPCs I’d never heard of, and threw in a few phrases in some random fantasy language I didn’t know.

I had no idea what to say to the guy. Clearly he thought my character should know these things. But I was a noob OOC (out of character) and just didn’t. All I knew about dark elves is that they were an evil race, and the questgivers had been vaguely sarcastic.

So in order to RP with any kind of depth, the game needs to present its lore to the characters well. And players in general need to understand that not everyone knows the background in depth and off by heart.

Wolfshead compares RP with a film:

This is exactly the scenario that the characters of Micheal Crichton’s amazing Timeline novel found themselves in. In his story, a bunch of modern day scientists and anthropologists travel back in time to the 13th century France and are forced to deal with the people and politics of the time in order to survive. One small mistake in dialect or custom and they would be imprisoned and even worse burned at the stake.  The result was that they HAD to role-play — it was a matter of survival.

Yes, but they were modern day scientists and anthropologists. They had the information they needed. A new player in a strange world won’t know all those things. You can’t expect them to RP as if their life depended on it – they simply don’t know the things their characters should know. (Unless you start them all off as amnesiacs, which would be a workable background, especially in a scifi type of game).

3. Hell is other people

One of the characteristics of a strongly social game is that they get very political. People can and do try to manipulate each other by faking friendliness, cybering, and ganging up against each other in their various cliques. Or in other words, metagaming.

In a RP type game, who you know and what you know can be as important as stats in a typical MMO today. And if you can schmooze people OOC and persuade them to tell you interesting things about their character or other people’s characters then you may be able to use the information to boost your self in game. Being a particularly entertaining RPer (or just being good at cybering) can make a player very popular – even if it’s not appropriate for their character.

As long as this is an advantageous strategy (and it is) then you cannot stop players from doing it. They’re never ‘just playing their characters’. They are playing the other players too.

In many ways, our stat and gear and skill based games are much more even-handed and accessible. If you do the grind, you get the gear. You don’t have to actually make friends (or fake friends) to get anywhere in game. This is not to say that social networking isn’t a useful skill, but in social games it can get quite toxic.

4. He said. She said.

In an RP centric game, the influence of NPCs is kept to a minimum. That means that all the most important resources in game are ‘owned’ by players or player-factions. A resource might be anything from an important NPC (their influence may be monitored but that doesn’t mean that there might not be NPC faction leaders – often we do this to keep some continuity in the storylines, even though players may come and go), to a city, or a crafting guild, or any story entity. And that sometimes means that players need to somehow ask permission from other players before they can work story elements into their story.

I’ll give a WoW example for this. Assume a night elf player thinks up an awesome back story for himself – in the past he got captured by blood elves while spying near Silvermoon, then he was tortured, but he managed to bravely escape and make it back to his own people. This is fine as far as it goes, but what happens if the blood elf players say ‘Wait, why would we have let an enemy spy escape? Surely we’d have just executed them. We don’t agree with that history, it didn’t happen. He is ICly making it up.’

Now imagine this kind of scenario every time a player wants to write a backstory that possibly involves other player factions. Bear in mind that some players will never ever agree that their faction might have made a mistake which could weaken them in future, even though it might make for a better story. So given one faction which occasionally agrees to being flawed for the sake of making a better story and another who never ever agree to making mistakes, the latter has an in game advantage.

So basically, it’s very very hard to get gamers to put story above personal gain. There’s no real way to reward it. That’s where the GM comes in – s/he takes that option out of the players’ hands. Left to their own devices, players will tend to play safe.

In MUSHes, we got around this by having an active set of staff. We reviewed all backgrounds before characters went live and agreed any background details with appropriate people. We also made notes of who had which links so that we could set up various stories between different players. (For example, if one player had been a cop and another was an ex-con, we might OOCly point out to them that they might have known each other – then it’s down to the players if they want to run with it or not.)

This is important because although it’s all very well to write your own story in a vacuum, it won’t work in a MMO unless everyone else buys in.

5. Tracking the history

A characteristic of this kind of game is that political allegiances and storylines can change rapidly. Even vast world-spanning conspiracies may be over in a couple of months. What players do can and will affect the world –- or at the very least it affects other players. But how to keep track of the in game history? How are new players to know the recent history of some faction or other? And bear in mind that from point #2, they may need to know these things in order to roleplay with other players who remember it.

This is a very real and very difficult problem. It is best solved by bboards and wikis and other means for players to record their own histories for other people to read. And these suffer exactly the same issues as real life histories –- they are subject to bias, and to the author only having one side of the story. They’re subject to not being kept up to date, by the maintainer getting bored, by small grounds of players deciding to keep their own faction history somewhere else and forgetting to tell people, etc.

Hopefully some players will take on the role of chroniclers or journalists, so that the stories will not be forgotten. The reason this is important is because things that have happened in the past affect the present. If a leader of one faction was snubbed by the leader of another, then she may hold a grudge for years. Pity the poor player who doesn’t know what anyone in game at the time would have known (ie. not to mention the offending faction in the presence of the other faction leader) and gets into serious IC trouble for their pains.

Towards a better roleplaying experience online

I’m going to write a series of posts about improving RP in MMOs – probably one a week. I don’t think they ever can or should be the sort of game that Wolfshead describes. Aside from being full of RP Nazis (you know the sort of person who barrages you with whispers every time you open your mouth, telling you that your  character wouldn’t do or say that and that you’re doing it wrong?), it simply doesn’t play to the strengths of computer generated worlds.

In a MMO, no one ever has to ask the GM ‘what can I see?’ or ‘what can I do next?’. Every time you see an awesome vista in game, fly across a crazy zone full of giant mushrooms, or cast a fireball, you’re experiencing something very different and very special compared to your tabletop compatriots. It’s like being there.

Tabletop players have all the freedom in the world. But computer gamers don’t have all their experiences filtered through a GM. Vive la difference! And that’s the charm.

Ich habe mit Statbuilder ja schon mein Faible für Metagaming öffentlich gemacht, jetzt sind mir noch zwei weitere Spiele untergekommen, die das Ganze nochmal einen Schritt weiter treiben. Bei Achievement Unlocked wird der neuerdings aufgekommene Achievement-Wahn aufs Korn genommen. Das Spiel selbst ist ein schlechtes “Jump n’ Run” (wenn es diesen Namen überhaupt verdient), es gibt allerdings für alle möglichen Sachen ein Achievement (“You started the game!”). Alle 99 möglichen Achievements zu erreichen ist gar nicht so einfach, aber als Erfolgsjunkie kann man sowieso nicht vorher aufhören.

Upgrade Complete hingegen beschäftigt sich mit dem beliebten Genre der Weltraumballerspiele. Wie leider bei diesen oft der Fall, geht es neben dem eher mittelmäßigen Spiel hauptsächlich darum, alle Spielinhalte durch Upgrades aufzuwerten. Upgrade Complete geht dabei über das schnöde Verbessern von Waffen und Schilden hinaus, auch Hintergrundgrafiken, das Hauptmenü und das Copyright können ausgebaut werden. Und wem die Grafik zu schlecht ist, der kauft sich das Upgrade für die Grafikengine…

Achievement Unlocked

Upgrade Complete

I keep track of several roleplay PWs on various platforms. One of them is Arelith, an NWN1 world. I highly respect the team that built and maintains the world. Their world is a mod of a seven year old game that last had an expansion nearly five years ago, yet the community is still healthy and active.

One thread on its forums however caught my eye, because it is about a design decision that makes me cringe. Like most NWN PWs, Arelith is a diku style world with a serial martyrdom death system. It has the slight variant to this that a dead character can either respawn, or wait until someone brings their corpse somewhere to be raised. If they are revived, they escape the death penalty that would otherwise have been applied. So far, this is typical NWN and there are many variants on this theme; some of which leave the player’s camera at the scene of death and others that move the camera to a death plane, leaving the corpse behind that can be revived. In NWN, the camera is tied to the PC avatar, so the latter is usually accomplished by moving the avatar to another location and leaving a corpse object behind. In Arelith’s case, the corpse object can be picked up and it can also be destroyed. The owner of the dead character currently gets a message indicating whenever their corpse has been picked up, dropped or destroyed, but not who did it. If the corpse has been destroyed, the destroyer gets a skull, a small amount of money and the “victim” loses his/her get out of jail free card and must take the respawn penalty.

This is where the fun begins. There is a mechanism where one player can make gain by inflicting other players with a perceived loss.

I’m not privy to the motivations for that design, though I suspect a pen and paper (PnP) D&D influence. Most likely, the convincing arguments were on a gamist and/or simulationist basis. In the former case, the idea that someone would want to avoid the “legitimate” penalty for failure is anathema. In the latter case, there is a realism factor in carrying corpses. I’m not actually interested in the specifics of the system or in the reasoning behind it so much as in the effect on the players. Some players have little or no advancement motive. If the player does not derive pleasure from counting points, grinding is a job; an entry level, low pay, low status job and loss of avatar capital is akin to not being paid for putting in your hours at McDonalds. Such players will go to great lengths to avoid a death penalty. If there is a way for them to avoid it by waiting for a rez, then they will do so.

If another player comes along and takes away that escape clause, it will cause distress. There are lots of arguments that the whole thing is entirely appropriate because it is in character (IC) and that it is just a game, so nobody should get worked up. Such arguments forget a little aspect of human psychology. When people feel that another player – as a player – has screwed them – as a player – over, then what is IC and what is metagaming simply does not matter. It does not matter if that player feels that it is entirely legitimate that the victim accepts the penalty. The victim feels that they are losing hours of grinding at the hands of another player; especially as it is not on a consensual basis. It is as if someone jumped on their sand castle and losing your sand castle this way is never just a game.

If you wanted to create a gameplay mechanic tailor made for griefing, you could do little better than Arelith’s corpse bashing, except perhaps by adding permadeath to the mix. Well, you could remove the message that a character’s corpse has been destroyed, causing them to wait in vain.

Anyone who has ever read through Nick Yee’s excellent work researching MMO player motivations may have caught the fact that the roleplay motivations are quite independent from other motivations. They might also have noticed that the roleplayer motivations are held more often by females and older players and the competition tends to be a motive for younger, male, players. In short, though you can’t make the blanket statement that roleplayers are carebears, the transect between the darkfall playerbase and the roleplayer motivation is only a fraction of the roleplay crowd. If your world is Darkfall meets roleplay and you are building for those players whole like to be IC while they gank people, then you can just tell the victim that he is being a whiney carebear and be done with it. Otherwise you have to do your best to “goon proof” your world.

There is a general rule that 1% of the population is sociopathic. This does not mean that they are raving serial murderers, but it means that at least one percent of the population – a subset composed almost entirely of males, so 2% of all men – lack empathy. Some are simply indifferent to the needs of others. Others actively enjoy inflicting anguish. The anonymity of online games is an attractant to these people in the same way that sweets attract bears at a campsite; so we have to reckon that our sociopath fraction is higher than 1%. Even if there was no gain to the character that destroyed the corpse, such people will derive pleasure from it for its own sake. That world currently has a problem with a griefer who repeated returns despite being repeatedly being banned. If he were more sophisticated, he’d not be attacking live characters, but instead anonymously bashing corpses. Such an individual could operate indefinitely, cause a great deal of psychological harm and never be caught. How many such individuals are currently operating this way on Arelith, using the IC cover that their character is evil? In addition to the bona fide sociopaths, a sizable portion of the playbase will not be averse to putting the screws to someone outside their monkeysphere if there was something to be gained from it. They’ll give plausible IC justifications of course, but the fact is that they – as players – are defecting when they harm other players in a non consensual way. This may sound strange coming from a advocate of strong IC systems, but “it is IC” can also be used as a pretext for a player to be a wanker. A “be nice” rule is meaningless in such an environment.

With this in mind, consider that your highly networked players are statistically more likely to be older females. 40 year old librarians who live with three cats and can name every character from the Wheel of Time series are a bit more likely to end up victimized by such a scheme than to be perpetrators. It is a hard fact that some of your players – the highly networked ones – are simply more valuable to the health of your community than others. These people won’t say a word, they’ll just leave for greener pastures and their friends will eventually follow them. This has happened before. I’ve spoken to one roleplay NWN2 PW admin who had his playerbase decimated by a something awful faction moving in. (Edit) Some of them (SA people/goons) seem to be excellent roleplayers, but they’ll still leave your world as a bloody, empty corpse if they don’t like it; and still might anyway even if they do. (/Edit) Now imagine if goons invaded your world? Do you have any systems that can abused to empty it?

The question I’d have for the server admin is whether he/she has an overview of the usage patterns of this bashing feature. Any time you have a gameplay feature that can be abused, you should assume that it will be and closely monitor it. The best way would be logging corpse related actions (perp playername & character name, victim playername and character name, the races of the two, was it bashed? Dropped into a container? Rezzed? Etc.) to a database and periodically pull it into Excel to data mine it in a pivot table. Such surveys would tell the server management who is doing what and under what conditions and would let them easily root out abuses of the system.

As for player behavior, he/she should also consider game theory and that if there is a gain and no penalty for defecting, eventually defecting will become the norm. He should resist calls to exacerbate the problem by removing the message that the corpse has been destroyed and instead give a clear indication of who picked the body up and what they did with it (e.g. if it was put down and where or put into another container). Such accountability may be metagaming, but by exposing players to a possible tit-for-tat retaliation if they defect, it enforces the be nice rule.

the streets of Lost Angels

 

The following is a scene that played out just a few days ago.  There are three characters in this scene, Demon X, SR, and myself.  SR is from what I can gather a new player or relatively new because of what she was doing from the very beginning of this scene, metagaming.  Metagaming is when you use any sort of information that was gained OOC (Out of Character) to use IC (In Character).  An example would be someone you just met using the name above your head without ever having met you or having been told of you.  This is widely frowned on by the role playing community because in real life, you would not know someone’s name having met them the first time. When we are in Second Life we have our name above our heads at all times.  In our role play sim, we have out meters which detect damage, show status, and level.  We also may have, as I do, other descriptive text above our heads but solely for reference purposes only.  My friend Demon X wears a tail but is otherwise human in appearance and I am completely human in appearance yet carry the title of incubus above my head.  With this in mind read on.

 

The scene is as follows:  DemonX and I are standing on a rooftop looking over the city when a human appearing female, SR, climbs up and joins us.  Neither of us had ever seen or addressed her before.

Click here to read the dialogue

Three possible scenarios could happen here.

1. Deciding to completely ignore this person.

2. Threatening to kill them for knowing too much.

3. Reporting them to a GM.

We decided to ignore her but a call to a GM would render sanctions and killing them would be a waste of time, why bother.

The best way to keep from metagaming is to check whether you have met this person before.  Do not read tags or descriptions to use later in your roleplaying.  Also do not use OOC comments in your IC (in character) chat.  This will ensure that you have a smooth roleplay session.

D&D is great, isn’t it? But a real problem is how to map your combats properly. The best way seems to be some sort of token on a dry-wipe mat.

It works well. The square grid is how miniature combat works best, no messing around with rulers or figuring out how to move in a straight line on hexes.

The problem comes with how best to represent heroes and creatures. Painted miniatures clearly look the best, but can be prohibitively expensive. Beads or counters are cheap, but are quite generic.

I require Kobolds soon. Spoiler alert? Perhaps. Players, expect kobolds in the future. By the time they show up, I will hopefully have decided upon the best method of representing them.

Lets start with that common denizen of every gaming table, the die.

An experienced group, particularly one who’s played a white wolf game, will have plenty of spare dice. It’s the easiest thing in the world to grab a handful of spare D10s to show where kobolds are standing.

So, cost? Essentially, free. They’re things you already have at the gaming table and when they aren’t a kobold anymore they’re still dice.

Appearance scores low, it’s not very pretty to fight a group of dice, and it rarely represents a monster well, although it could be the most dreaded Gelatinous Octahedron.

Other issues? Well, they’re dice. Once you’ve been playing a while pieces of sets go missing until your dice bag has more colours than penny sweets. While it does make it a bit easier to attack the ‘Blue D6 kobold, next to the white D10 kobold’ it makes it a lot harder for the DM (i.e. me) to keep track of which is which.

“The kobold shoots you. I thought we killed all the archers? No, the d10s are archers, the d12s were spearmen. You killed all them.”

Added to that is the fact that if theres anything thats going to be grabbed by a player, it’s a die. The cunning munchkin could escape an ambush by using a kobold to roll his initative, or accidentaly add monsters to the combat with a poorly aimed roll.

What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? No, it’s just his attack roll.

So, spare dice to represent monsters works great for hordes of cheap monsters like minions or low-level kobolds, but several kobolds with different weapons are just going to get lost. Add to that the problem of minions appearing and vanishing when you roll dice, and it seems the spare contents of your dice bag is not the best choice for a monster token.

During a scene in which the player who had requested the scene continued to post long expositions that made everyone’s actions more or less futile, and several of my friends, communicating via “whisper” expressed frustration, I took it upon myself to whisper the “host”, who had already made comments like “the RP’s I participate in aren’t novice literature.”:

[8:18:12 PM] Bram: I should point out that several of us are getting bored with the slow pace and lack of direction. If this is what qualifies as “high concept” rp in your estimation, perhaps you could have chosen a venue with more like-minded players.
[8:18:59 PM] Bram: We’re not opposed to playing this scene out with you, but a little more alacrity would behoove us all.

[8:19:16 PM] Asiil: It isn’t my post.

[8:19:25 PM] Bram: I’m saying in general.

[8:20:56 PM] Asiil: Sakura and Kabu are already aware of this so the end result won’t be a surprise <..< There is a planned event for this character in the semi-near future that involves her death in this RP. I’m not saying ya’lls characters need to just give up and walk away, but anticipate a negative result in the end. Kabu’s character is involved in that future.

[8:21:56 PM] Bram: If I may be so bold as to ask….. I see. So, this is basically a masturbatory cutscene.

[8:22:46 PM] Asiil: Essentially. I like Rping my scenes regarding character and plot development rather than just NPCing them.
[8:22:55 PM] Asiil: Makes development much more interesting.

[8:23:52 PM] Bram: It’s… interesting… to be involved in a scene with a foregone conclusion? Hm. It might have been kind to let the prospective players know this beforehand so they could better estimate the return-on-investment for their involvement.
[8:26:59 PM] Bram: And, if I’m to be essentially used as one of the fingers on a hand that is jerking someone off, I’d like to know about it beforehand.
[8:27:26 PM] Bram: Just for future reference.

Here, I had my character act in a way that I felt was both appropriate to the character’s personality, and served the stated goals of the host- namely to end the scene with his character (a huge sea-dragon) dead. For which I won an accusation of “You’re fucking metagaming!”

[8:58:33 PM] Bram: Incidentally, just because I AIMED the slash at the dragon’s neck doesn’t mean it will land there, or kill it right off. Because I don’t powergame or tell other players what happens to their characters.

[8:59:36 PM] Asiil: That is appreciated, but at this point, I made a mistake coming here and am just trying to let ya’ll get out of it without seeming like I’m twinking out.
[8:59:44 PM] Asiil: Shouldn’t last more’n a round or two from here.

[9:00:02 PM] Bram: Mm. Very considerate of you.
[9:00:04 PM] * Bram bows.

And this was a response to the indignant post that “You’re fucking metagaming!”

[9:08:29 PM] Bram: Also, I would like to point out that “metagaming”, IE using OOC knowledge to further IC plots or character development, is no longer considered quite the sin it once was, in many modern gaming circles. When used properly and with care, it can actually facilitate better and more powerful roleplaying. ((OOC = “Out of Character”, IC = “In Character”))

[9:08:54 PM] Asiil: Not in any reputable dream. ((The place where the scene took place allows user-created areas called “dreams”))

[9:09:58 PM] * Bram shakes his head. “You’re so condescending. It’s really quite tacky. Who decides what’s “reputable”? Asinine and judgmental statements like that won’t win you any friends. I suggest you take your superior attitude back to a “reputable dream” and stay there.”

9:40:28 PM Player Asiil has logged off.

*

Later, in the tavern, I run into a regular player who constantly comes up with new characters. Their current one is a young boy, who constantly asks questions about things one would expect a young, uneducated boy to ask questions about, and then revealing disturbing personal information about the character through apparent “innocent” responses to the answers- like that the boy had been castrated by pirates. Now, at the time I was under the assumption that we were all just playing casually, which is typical for the tavern crowd; so I wasn’t taking it too seriously, cracking wise, and joshing with the player through in-character interactions. But then it became apparent he was taking it seriously, so I had to break it off.

You say, “[I'll be perfectly honest, I can't take seriously a character of a young child whose been sexually mutilated by pirates. That's just fucked up, and I don't think it's really appropriate to throw that kind of thing into gen-pop without some kind of warning or agreement]“
You say, “[Maybe that's just me]“

Jesus Smith: (The Catholic church did it all the time in the Mideval ages to their chior boys)
Jesus Smith: (called a “Castrato” look it up)

You say, “[yeah, I'm aware of that.]“

At this point, one of the regulars spoke up in his defense, and another told me I was wasting my time.

You say, “[So, consensus is against me here, then? Fine. But I'd like to note for the record that I don't approve of sexual mutilation of children as a general RP topic, and will abstain from further interactions with the character]“
You say, “[I think it's fine if that's something you, the player, want to explore, but I don't think this is the proper place for it. And now I'm shutting up and moving on.]“

Jesus Smith: (Listen, just beause I am RPing a mutilated character does not meen I wish this onto childern. Also, inmy opinion, that statement did not make you any better than the person we were bitching about a moment ago)
Jesus Smith: (Again that’s, just my opinion.)

You say, “[I'm not forcing my ideas on you. I have bowed to consensus and withdrawn myself from the interaction of my own free will. I retcon ((that's roleplayer lingo for "take back")) all my prior statements toward the child]“

Jesus Smith: (Bram, that’s not what made me angry, its the OOC statment.)

At this point, I didn’t want to continue to pollute the public area with our disagreement, so I suggested we take the disagreement to whispers. Someone else suggested it simultaneously.

You say, “[take it to whisper if you'd like to continue]“

Jesus Smith: (no I’m not I’m jus tmaking it clear I am not blurring the OOC IC line here)

The player (in character) continued to complain about my character’s wisecracks toward him, trying to get other people in the room to extract an apology. Every time someone came into the room, he would point at me and say “That man’s being mean to me!” and such. I thought I’d made myself clear, so I then whispered a bit more forcefully.

[10:37:06 PM] Bram: Ok, Fids, or whomever you are. OOCly, I, the player of Bram, do not wish to engage in IC interactions with your current character. You have brought up subjects I do not feel it is appropriate to explore in a public forum. Please disregard all past interactions between Bram and Jesus, and please refrain from further interactions.
[10:37:11 PM] Bram: Is that clear enough?

[10:40:55 PM] Jesus|Smith: Fine, you don’t have to. But make it clear just because I Rp this character dosn’t meen I am a freek OOC that likes the thoughts of kids getting castrated. Just that the pirates that did that to him was all sorts of fucked up. I don’t appricate being treeted like such.

[10:41:56 PM] Bram: What situations you want to explore via RP are your own business, and I’m not judging your choice of character- just your choice of public venue to carry it out in.

[10:42:50 PM] Jesus|Smith: What situations? oh, oh say that pirates have done fucked up things in the past to people?

[10:44:11 PM] Bram: Dude. You’re missing the point. You play whatever you want, for whatever reasons make sense to you. I don’t want to participate, for reasons that make sense to me. End of story.

He didn’t stop, continuing to whine, in character as a little boy, and try to coax adult characters into punishing me on his behalf.

[10:47:32 PM] Bram: Ok. You’re still doing it.

[10:47:53 PM] Jesus|Smith: I didn’t agree to the retcon

[10:48:08 PM] Bram: You don’t have to agree.
[10:48:25 PM] Bram: Don’t. Interact. With. My. Character. Period.

[10:48:41 PM] Jesus|Smith: he’s not, he’s interacting with Zeethran.

[10:49:12 PM] Bram: Dude. Don’t be a douchebag. I’m trying to treat you with respect here, please do the same.

The player then posted back in the public channel, asking why I had called him a douchebag in whisper when he was being civil; now apparently trying to incite not just characters, but their players, against me on an OOC level. I refused to take the bait and responded only in whisper.

[10:51:01 PM] Bram: I didn’t call you one. I said don’t be one. There’s a difference. And we took this to whisper to avoid bothering the other players, as they requested.
[10:51:29 PM] Bram: And you are not being civil, you are repeatedly ignoring my several requests to not continue interacting.

[10:51:41 PM] Jesus|Smith: again Bram, he was talking to Zeethran, not your character

[10:51:42 PM] Bram: It’s impolite, disrespectful, and bad sportsmanship.
[10:52:06 PM] Bram: He was talking to Zeeth ABOUT my character, and pointing to my character, and you know damn well that’s still interacting.
[10:52:24 PM] Bram: My character does not exist as far as you are concerned. Don’t. Do it. Again.

[10:52:47 PM] Jesus|Smith: Um, IC actions IC conenquences. You said something “mean” to a kid, he is going to react to it and BLAB

[10:53:12 PM] Bram: Then retcon it, as I requested.

[10:53:22 PM] Jesus|Smith: I don’t agree to the retcon

[10:53:39 PM] Bram: I’m not ASKING you. I’m TELLING you.

[10:53:53 PM] Jesus|Smith: again, Bram, I don’t accept the retcon

[10:54:12 PM] Bram: I’m putting you on Ignore now, because you won’t listen to reason. Goodbye.
Started ignoring Jesus|Smith.

*

So, yeah. Big fun. Later, all the aggravation paid off with a pretty good session, which I will probably post about also.

I’m not part of CrazyKinux’s EVE Blog Pack, but that shouldn’t stop me from posting on the current blog banter on metagaming, right?

This month’s topic comes to us from Mynxee of Life in Low Sec. She asks “Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is ‘ruining the game’”?

Everyone else has explained in detail what metagaming really is and how it works in EVE, but I want to examine the issue from a role-playing perspective rather than a purely game-mechanical one. Fortunately, EVE binds these two very closely together, as RPGs should.

So when does taking action based on information we possess as players but not as characters cause problems?

In roleplay, this varies because it depends on the impact on other players. A friend of mine from SWG used to say, “if you’re not metagaming, you’re not trying”. This really was a joke, but every joke contains a kernel of truth. In this case the truth is that we all metagame sometimes. Getting online when you know your friend is playing, convincing your RL brother to play, all these things are metagaming to one extent or another.

But when we’re talking about purely IC interactions, it can cause real problems. For example, I know OOC that Mynxee and Roc Wieler (the characters) have some sort of relationship. That’s cool and entertaining and fascinating to me, the player. But if Casiella ran across Mynxee in Molden Heath and asked her about that relationship, it would be very uncool. That’s the dark side of metagaming.

The great thing about a real sandbox like EVE is that even when it happens in game mechanical terms (ref. the BoB defector that disbanded the alliance), you can find reasonable IC explanations. Why can’t we assume that the actual character turned on his old alliance? He took the action to kick the corps and thus disband BoB, so there’s no reason for our characters to have trouble grasping this if they have any knowledge of the entire affair. The fact that it involved his play on another character and deciding he liked GoonSwarm better really doesn’t matter.

Like a lot of things in life, the answer comes down to “it depends”. If you’re using OOC knowledge to benefit your character in a way that hurts other people and defies what should be realistic in the confines of the fictional universe (moving into godmoding), then that’s a problem. But if you’re doing so in a way that results in more fun for everyone involved, then it’s a bonus due to the ingenuity and creativity of players. That can mean just increasing gameplay like the fun people have had in Delve over the last several weeks, or it can mean using alts to fill in holes when you don’t have other folks to accompany you on a low-sec run or for a role in a given storyline.

UPDATE:

• Epic Misadventures, This is my Alt – There are many like it but this one is mine.
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, I Missed This Month’s Blog Banter!
• A Mule in EvE, Meta what? Is it hurting EvE?
• Morphisat’s EVE Online Blog, Me, Myself and I
• One Man And His Spaceship, Me and My Shadow
• Ombeve, Blog Banter edition 5
• Diving into PsycheDiver’s Psyche, CK’s Blog Banter #5: Everybody Needs Somebody
• Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter
• Ecliptic Rift, OOC: Blog Banter #5 Metagaming
• The Ralpha Dogs, Me, Myself and I
• Mad Rant, “Blog Banter – It’s my party, and I’ll alt if I want to….”
• EVE Chick, The Handicapper General
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, “…you see mate, it’s a matter of leverage, savvy?…”
• New Eden Diaries, It’s only a game
• Oz’s House of the Evil Dead, If You Can’t Ride Two Horses At Once, You Shouldn’t Be In The Circus
• Diving into PsycheDiver’s Psyche, Everybody Needs Somebody
• CrazyKinux’s Musing, Leave what you know at the door please!
• Diary of a Pod Pilot, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #5 Metagaming
• Roc’s Ramblings, February Blog Banter – Meta Me

I’ve also linked the main post at the top here. Will update if I see more!

A thread on the forums of an NWN1 PW reminded me of another of the evils of levels. They force metagaming in supposedly immersive roleplay environments.

Let’s take the humble gate guard and his role in the world. He is nearly ubiquitous; being one of the stock decorative NPCs whose role is to convey the idea that there is a ruling entity to “keep the peace”. He represents stability and government in whatever parts of the world are civilized. He is not all powerful. If he were, player characters would be redundant. All of those pressing issues that the denizens of the town have to deal with (a.k.a. quests) would get accomplished so much easier with a reliable police force instead of unreliable mercenaries and bounty hunters (a.k.a. player characters). Those orcs that keep raiding the settlements? Exterminated. Those bandits bothering the trade caravans? All locked up. That dragon (a.k.a. the raid instance) who takes a virgin every full moon as a “protection” payment? Long since stuffed and placed in a museum.

Obviously, the guards can’t be all powerful or these adventure tropes would not exist. Nor can they be all powerful, but too busy to do their jobs. We can’t take the argument that the guards are for the town only. No settlement of any size can survive without the support of the surrounding countryside. Cutting a town or city off from its lifeline to the surrounding countryside is exactly what besieging armies do. The sovereign territory of even the smallest city states extends far enough into the countryside to guarantee a supply of food and water for the city. A guard or militia that was technically capable of dealing with these problems, but chose not to… well, that is a genre by itself and when the characters in this genre have guns, we call it Half Life 2. Let’s presume for a moment that we are not roleplaying subversives in an Orwellian nightmare of a world. Then we are back to non-über guards.

Except there is a problem. Players inhabit our worlds. The player characters – especially elder game characters at or near the level cap – are supposed to be great heroes that are powerful. Except that there are a lot of these epic and unique individuals. Some of these great heroes are more like villains; or at least prone to rowdyism.

This causes a problem for the world in that non-über guards would die regularly at the hands of miscreant PCs. In this case, either the guards are being respawned on a regular basis, or being replaced on a regular basis with the near certainty that a powerful PC will come along and kill them in short order. Since we are after immersion, this straining of credibility is unacceptable. In addition to the lack of prowess, these guards usually do not have proper AI for dealing with miscreants. The “dumb” AI used on mobs, which seems so popular as a design decision for giving players a feeling of success when they pound the stuffing out of animated punching bags, only serves to make the guards weaker, clumsy, easily exploited, or all three.

The problem of course is that in order for the guards to be credible, they have to be completely over the top; or they have to be invulnerable or have some sort of god mode. The usual approach on roleplay oriented worlds is to make guards godlike and leave the awful AI. Then there is some rule about “using common sense” and pretending that they were not so weak, stupid or both after all. This is usually combined with a rule about requiring a GM to be present in order to play out the guards and keep control of the situation. From a purely immersion oriented standpoint, this sort of forced metagaming hurts the roleplay environment, rather than helping it.

I keep track of the forums of a number of roleplay persistent worlds of both the NWN 1/2 and MUD variety. The thread I mentioned in the opening sentence was very interesting. That world is in a Forgotten Realms setting. One of the players of a drow character wanted to clarify rules on sneaking onto a surface city. He was essentially told that doing so without a DM around was metagaming the NPC’s AI. A member of their community brought up a very good point.

I suspect the term metagaming is used slightly differently on compared to P&P gamers, or under vastly different circumstances.

Metagaming in the traditional meaning of the word is, though I expect violent protest against this, perfectly okay in many cases.

If, e. g., your characters are just about to start a journey to some faraway place, but you as players know that there’s a reset in five minutes, you might make your characters wait/prepare a little while so as not to be thrown back to your starting place by the reset. This is a clear case of metagaming – player knowledge changes character behaviour.

Players apparently ask about character levels here before partying to avoid the 5-level-gap-XP-penalty-mechanism, and their characters act accordingly. Again a case of metagaming – the characters have no concept of levels, XP or being in a party or not.

Sticking to certain rules or expected behaviours here requires a certain amount of metagaming in the traditional use of the word.

This particular server has a level cap of 30; which puts you well into the “epic” category under the 3E Dungeons and Dragon’s ruleset. We have a dissonance here. We are trying to achieve immersion conductive to roleplay, yet we have to explicitly spell out rules of conduct for when to take NPCs at face value and when not to; in short, how to metagame to preserve the fiction. This sort of officially sanctioned metagaming nonsense happens all over. Are there rules governing experience payout when there is a large level difference between characters? This is officially sanctioned metagaming. Are there any level based unlocks for gear, content, etc? Again, officially sanctioned metagaming. Do mobs not drop the equipment that they were obviously wielding? Etc. In such cases, we are asked to pretend we don’t see the gyrating elephant.

The lead developer of the server had a comment in the thread that was probably intended to be snarky:

My suggestion: Let’s put the level cap of Amia at 5. All problems solved

Interestingly enough, what if there was such a cap? That world would probably lose its playerbase. In my experience in the NWN PW roleplay scene, higher level caps tend to correlate with higher achiever/gamist focus at the loss of the other foci. Such a playerbase will always strike a balance between gameplay and immersion that errs on the gameplay side and have to live with the metagaming that it entails.

What about players who would not be scared away by such a policy? The dramists and simulationists of the world use the immersion factor to drive their play more so than the gameplay factor. Guards no longer need to be über because even the greatest of heroes are not invincible.

But is it viable?

NWN 1/2 makes a good data source for looking at this as it is a standardized “codebase” where the engine mechanics are the same or similar; so we can presumably make direct comparisons based on how high the level cap is. What does not bode well for this type of approach is that the seven NWN1 PWs categorized under roleplay that are currently up and have level caps below 20 as I write this have 25 players between them; with seventeen on “Zombie Survival”, six on one, two on another and the other four empty. On the NWN2 side, one of the two servers with a cap of 15 has two players and the other is empty. In total, the number of players on roleplay category servers currently number in the low hundreds between the two platforms.

This is interesting to me as the results of Nick Yee’s player motivations research suggests that there should be a large subset of roleplayers who don’t highly value achievement. Could it be that having the numbers available means that players want to metagame and will actively choose a world with higher level counts? Is this an artifact due to a large percentage of NWN players being attracted specifically to the D&D ruleset and its traditions? Is it because players simply expect achievement, even if they are not attracted to it explicitly? Or is it simply that the low cap worlds have other problems?

These are intersting questions for an immersion oriented designer.

In the past week, I’ve been playing a ROM of Mother 3/EarthBound 2, with a translation patch by the dedicated people at fobby.net who gave their time to rework this game for the sake of the fandom. As someone who liked EarthBound, but not enough to try to play the sequel with a walkthrough/script or read up on it or anything, I am one of those who would never have experienced the game without their translation. These people have worked hard in their free time without being paid to translate and patch an entire game, just because they cared about it that much, and because of that they’ve been able to bring it to more people who can appreciate it. Such an admirable, dedicated group of fans deserves praise, and I intend to deliver them some, as soon as I dare set foot on the interactive part of their site where spoilers are everywhere.

I have to say I’ve been quite impressed with the translation so far; as I would expect from a group of such dedicated, enthusiastic fans, they’ve done a great job bringing back the feeling of the Mother 2/EarthBound 1 translation. I can’t speak for how close they are to the original, but I trust them to be faithful. Even things like enemy names and English-language puns ring true. These translators deserve a giant helping of applause, and possibly jobs in the industry translating more of our RPGs.

As far as that industry goes, I’m in chapter seven at present, and discovering one major potential reason why Nintendo said they had no plans to bring it over to America: censorship and political concerns. The Magypsies are a group of magic-wielding, millenia-old, flamboyant lipsticked men with five o’clock shadow, and they’re turning out to be a huge part of the plot. They’re sturdily-built limp-wristed men who sit in giant pink heart-shaped glittery chairs. You can’t pretend they aren’t transvestites, and you also can’t pretend they’re really women, no matter what you make the dialogue say. They’re an extremely noticeable, important part of the game, and they are definitely the Good Guys. In Japan, people probably just laugh, but in America’s political climate, I don’t know how Nintendo would bring this game over without a lot of conservative Americans having a fit at the idea that their kids might play a game containing some transvestite characters (and ones who are good people, at that).

Gameplay is a little frustrating because the ROM– and its sound– aren’t perfectly synched with my button-pressing, which makes the rhythm-game aspect of the battles disappointingly chancy. I can actually hear the lag between the sound of my pushing a button and the sound of an enemy getting hit; emulation lag has never been this severe of an issue for me because my timing is often linked to also-lagging cues, but now it’s getting all up in my gameplay by interrupting rhythms that aren’t lagging in my head. Of course, the rhythm isn’t always meant to be smooth, either– the composers have made a great soundtrack full of battle themes that change tempo all the time. Some of these songs are going to take a lot of memorising to begin with. At least I have something to do during the random encounters.

At any rate, I’m enjoying this game (I did mention heaps of appreciation, right?) Due to life circumstances, I might have to put it on hold for a while in January, but part of me wants to just keep on playing.

I’ve never considered myself an achievement whore, and I’m proud to say so.  If achievement points netted me anything — anything at all — I might slip and go skipping down the rabbit hole.  But I’m a WoW veteran — I can smell the sour scent of addiction from a mile away.  If I grab an achievement, great.  If the achievment looks like it’s fun to get, I might give it a go.  But goddamnit, I am not going to play through some Fantastic Four game for a thousand ‘I’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do’ points.

And it’s good to know that I’m not alone — this game is all about achievements.  Besides locomotion the entire game is about earning different achievements.  It joins a host of other metagames (games about games) like You Have To Burn The Rope and Progress Quest, and I think it says something about how videogames are growing up.

These self-referential games, mocking popular game-isms and trends, might even evolve into a genre of their own; the videogame equivalent of the crude, tongue in cheek Shakespearean comedy.

Achievement Unlocked is, surprisingly, more about the right side of the screen than the left.

Kevin, CJ, and Dan (with a special summary by Brandon) sit down to discuss the age old problem of Metagaming. Specifically, how it doesn’t seem to be near the problem it once was, and in fact is a necessary component of many games. We break down many time honored claims leveled against the Metagame and pontificate about how recent evolutions in in game design have rendered many of them moot.

Crunchy Bits!

• Episode 4: 35 Minutes
• Intro and Outro music provided by Oh Possum.

I don’t usually play MMORPGs– I had a brief flirtation with Final Fantasy XI a few years ago, but my friend’s sister was always on it, which kept me from putting in enough steady time to get addicted. I’m kind of glad I didn’t blow too much time on it, because I don’t think that MMORPGs are my thing: the social world is too full of inarticulate teenagers, and the objectives are insufficiently concrete (and insufficiently motivated) for me to feel like I’m working towards something satisfying.

However, Second Life is an exception. It’s perhaps the only MMO game that doesn’t actually involve combat unless you go out of your way to join an RP group. Most of the focus in the world is one’s personal image and/or artistic creation. In short, it’s one of the few games that actually has creativity as a primary objective– most games, by nature, are not set up for it– and that intrigues me. I don’t play consistently, but every once in a while I pick it up for a bit and spend several days totally immersed in it.

When I first joined Second Life, I felt a little odd about the way it encourages people to spend money on it– even creating content costs you in-game currency for the necessary uploads, and because it’s creative you have a lot of people selling things, so there’s a big emphasis on spending currency to buy things. And the easiest way by far to get the in-game currency is to pay Linden Labs for it in US dollars, because although you can get a job in-game or “camp” to earn money, these things earn you a tiny pittance, and never enough to afford anything good. Although you can certainly play the game without spending any money and you can find lots of nifty things for free, being stingy in-game is not fun, because the nicest things always cost something.

So my biggest disappointment was that I felt like I was paying money to have fun in this game even though it was supposedly free. I have never liked the idea of spending real-world money to buy game items. Admittedly, you don’t have to spend very much in terms of real-world currency to have plenty in-game, and it’s not going to hurt my pocketbook to shell out the equivalent of $2 US to buy a dragon avatar and fly about the world as a giant golden hydra. I simply had some mental resistance to it.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing signs in Second Life about digital content creators’ associations and about resisting art theft. I think it finally sunk in for me that these people are artists who would like to get paid for their work. And it occurred to me to examine my resistance to spending money in the game. I realised that I was resisting based on an old idea I had about traditional MMORPGs: that equipment should be earned and not purchased with real-world money, and that using your credit card to equip yourself was a cheater’s trick; that if you spent enough time in the game to need good equipment, you should already be spending enough time actually playing the game to afford it with the money you got from quest objectives; and that if you had to spend real-world money to get enough equipment just to survive the beginning quests, then the game itself was poorly calibrated. But that situation was different. That was paying the game owners for your equipment, which you could also be earning by simply playing the game as it was meant to be played for the things that you were meant to enjoy. The situation is different in Second Life, where you’re really paying the digital artists who spent so much time to make these creations, and where my normal objections do not apply. I usually like to support artists and buy things from them because I believe that art is a job that people work hard at and should be paid for what they accomplish. And, now that I reflect on it, it would be good to support the artists of Second Life by making occasional purchases from them, as well.

So I suppose I no longer feel cheated that I might have to shell out actual money if I want to buy something nice in Second Life. I’m not being ripped off or cheating; I’m doing my part to support the hard work that people are putting into making nice things.

Gerade beim Leveln hört man ja immer mal wieder Beschwerden von Leuten, die zu wenig Platz haben.  Aus meiner Sicht einerseits nachvollziehbar, andererseits aber auch nicht.

Ich hatte ja bereits in einem anderen Artikel skizziert, wie man sich aufs Leveln vorbereiten konnte. Ein Punkt war dabei ganz klar: Taschenbereinigung. Bei mir hieß dies: alle Consumables bis auf 4-5 Slots weg (ok, mit Drums waren es noch  ein paar mehr, Pötte allerdings in Injektor Form mitschleppen, lohnt sich), alle alten Questitems und Marken weg (wer braucht mit WotLK noch Halaa Marken) und alle Professionssachen weg (Ausnahme bei mir: mein volle 24er Lederbag auf der Bank, die ist eh soulbound und hat sich definitiv gelohnt, weil ich auf der Bank nur 16er Bags hatte (30 G Aufpreis für 2 Plätze pro Bankslot, die ich nie wirklich brauchte, war mir dann doch zu viel). Auf dem Char habe ich dann im Schnitt 20 Slots (eine Haris Pilton Bag fürs Achievement hab ich mir dann doch noch gegönnt und am Char bringt es definitiv mehr als auf der Bank, weil hier der Platz doch knapper ist und eher ans Limit stößt, etwa in Instanzen oder beim Grinden).

Soviel dazu. Aber was ist nun mit dem Platzmangel, den jeder hätte, wenn es keine Mules gäbe. Fakt ist, dass Blizzard die begrenzten Taschenplätze als Balancing Faktor ansieht. Ob das so sinnvoll ist oder nicht, sei mal dahingestellt. Fakt ist, dass dies dazu geführt hat, dass man zahlreiche Dinge ausgelagert (oder neudeutscht: outsourcet) hat. Primäre Kandidaten: Rohstoffe und Raidmaterialien wie Pötte und Drums. Ich kenne viele Leute, die wie ich früher mehrere spezialisierte Bankchars hatten, weil selbst einer nicht genügte. Das hat sich nun, da es Gildenbanken gibt, etwas geändert, allerdings war das auch das Ende der alten Bankchargilden – denn nun hatte jeder, der ein Platzproblem hatte, eine eigene Gildenbank. Zumindest die ersten drei Seiten sind relativ bezahlbar (eigentlich ist auch 1000 G für die Ordnung noch ok, denke, das werde ich mir dann demnächst mal gönnen) und man braucht nicht mehr durch zig Alts zu loggen, um was bestimmtes zu suchen.

Eine andere Erleichterung war die sofortige Mailversendung accountintern. So kann man heute den Bankalt wirklich in der Bank lassen und muss nicht noch Guildies anschnorren, dass sie einem etwas festhalten, weil die Zeit zu knapp war.

Bei alledem stößt man dann doch recht schnell auf Widersprüche: einerseits soll Platz notorisch knapp sein – andererseits gibt es dank Blizzard nun die ultimative Lösung, dieses zu lösen. Es ist schon nachvollziehbar, warum Blizzard dieser Ausnutzung der Spielmechanik (1 Mann Bankgilden sind sicherlich eigentlich nicht vorgesehen, sondern ein Mitnahmeeffekt, wie man ihn auch aus dem Steuer- und Subventionswesen kennt), keinen Riegel vorgeschoben hat – einerseits ist es mutmaßlich relativ egal, ob jemand 4 Bankalts hat oder einen mit einer Gildenbank. Andererseits würden sämtliche Regelungen, die an die Gründung höhere Anforderungen stellen, ausgehebelt werden bei den Leuten, die dies wollen. Ich bin selber mal für 10 Minuten aus Addicted raus, um einem Offi eben eine Satzung zu unterschreiben. Das ganze organisiert und man hat jedenfalls für die Gründung alle denkbaren Barrieren ausgehebelt (außer evtl eine bestimmte Verweildauer der Gründungsmitglieder – das dürfte dann aber zu sehr in die Abläufe eingreifen). Andererseits kann es auch keine automatischen Auflösungskonditionen geben (etwa wenn nur noch 1 Mitglied in der Gilde ist). Auch dies wäre partiell durch weitere Bankalts auf demselben Account aushebelbar und außerdem würde man dann fragen, wohin mit den Materialien – im Zweifel als Post an den jeweiligen GM (also den gründenden Bankalt). Weiterhin entlasten großzügige Gildenbanken immerhin das früher total zugemüllte Postsystem. Ich glaube, es gab Zeiten, wo ich auf Main und Alt zu keiner Zeit weniger als 2 Seiten Post hatte (gerade, als man keine Post mit mehreren Anhängen schicken konnte – auch entsprechende Addons haben das Ganze ja nur auf mehrere Mails aufgeteilt).

Ferner gibt es ja bekanntlicherweise seit 3.0 eine deutliche Erleichterung für alle Mount und Petsammler und mittelbar über den Tabard Vendor auch für die Tabard Sammler. Zwar habe ich mich gefragt, warum bei den Marken nur sehr rigide gelistet wurde (also bspw keine Halaa Marken, keine Terokkar Shards, die ja auf ähnliche Weise gesammelt werden wie Badges of Justice oder BG Marken), aber es war definitiv spürbar. Was nun noch bleibt, sind die Leute, die Retrogear sammeln (es soll Leute geben, die von jedem T Set einen kompletten Satz auf der Bank liegen haben) oder die auf Gimmicks stehen (meine BC Sammlung umfaßt u.a. den Hammer of the Naaru und die Bladefist als optisch sehr ansprechende Hightlights von BC, dazu die Axtgitarre aus dem Invasionevent und einige Kleinigkeiten, denke, das volle SWP Heilerset werde ich wohl auch aufbewahren, weils halt von den Farben her sehr toll war/ist – der Rest ist größtenteils schon weg).

Zugegebenermaßen, bei meinem Rogue, den ich gerade level, sieht das etwas anders aus, der hat halt komplettes T1, T2, fast komplettes T2.5 und noch anderes Zeugs rumfliegen. Und davon trenn ich mich momentan nicht so gerne – aber der Tag wird kommen – spätestens wenn ich in Northrend anfange! Dazu kommt, dass mir ein zweiter Herbalist (oder eher ein dritter, auch mein Hunter ist Herber) die Kräuterbunker so schnell füllt, dass ich langfristig da noch ne Lösung finden muss. Immerhin ist ja mittelfristig angedacht, meinen Schami zum Alchi umzuskillen – was wohl passieren wird, wenn der Rogue 80 mit Epic Flieger ist – insofern wird da auch wieder Zeut verschwinden.

I have a knitting blog by another name, but my target audience for that blog is decidedly different than my Warcraft crowd.  So that I do not bore the snot out of my family by going on and on about pwning that noob warlock and his blue guy (strangely enough, my grandparents just don’t care), I decided that I should have a blog for each hobby.

How do I manage two time-consuming hobbies?  Manage? Hah!  Not a whole lot of managing goes on.  More like streaking.  The entirety of August, September, and October were dedicated to WoW, but for the three months before that, I only played Lost Odyssey and that only a tiny bit when my right hand started cramping from the project du jour.  November has started out with more balance.  Some mornings I come into work early feeling peaceful and relaxed–very zen.  The night before, I knitted.  Other mornings I arrive a little late, a lot frazzled, and with one eye twitching.  The night before, I gamed.  Gaming is exciting in a way that knitting isn’t and shouldn’t be.

The world keeps turning. I’ve started practicing for Super Mario World speed runs. After completing a few runs with abysmal times, I began to understand that I was wasting a lot of time being cautious. If I play recklessly I might screw up, but if I don’t then my time will be better; on the other hand, if I screw up even once then I’ll have to start over from the beginning.

So I have a lot of practice ahead of me. Last night I nearly completed a decent run, but I died near the end of Bowser’s castle because my cat decided to come over and headbutt my hands while I was playing. She didn’t mean any harm by it, of course, but it was rather frustrating. Back to the start screen for me…

Incidentally, The Backloggery is a site that may be of interest. Although ostensibly for cataloguing one’s game collection for one’s own benefit, I wonder if it will become the seed of a social networking site for gamers. I wouldn’t mind that.

Comments on my prior blog entry about the price of games have me thinking. There are at least two upcoming PS3 games that I would love to purchase (The Last Remnant and Heavy Rain), and various others that I’d love to give a spin. It’s gotten to the point where, if the PS3 were the price of the average console, I would say it’s time to buy one. But– ouch. The price difference takes it from a range where I’d easily choose to purchase it, into a range where it’s not as easy of a decision for me. If Sony didn’t charge an exorbitant price for their console, I would shell out for it right now. Would they rather risk that I not do so? This is the direct impact of their decision, which they may have thought wouldn’t matter that much. Right here, right now, it is mattering: I definitely want one, but I won’t just run out and buy one now.

I suspect that because the Playstation caters more towards the older sector of the gaming crowd than the kids, Sony thought they could set a high price since it is a “mature” console. A high price for a working adult is more than a high price for a child, it’s true– but what they may have overlooked is that the price is simply a lot. Even without the downturn in today’s economy, the average American would have to be serious about gaming to buy a PS3.

Would Super Mario Bros. 3 alone be worth $100? I believe so, given what it delivers– but perhaps not to someone, even a serious gamer, who hasn’t played it. When buying a new console, gamers take the risk that there might not be any games on the console that captivate them enough to make it worth the price; perhaps they’ll neglect it and play mostly on some other console. It’s a lot of money down, betting that the reward will be worth the price. Even though there’s a good chance that the bet will pay off, how much money does the average gamer want to stake on that risk? There’s a certain price that gamers are used to staking; when that abruptly rises with no more guarantee of payoff than their usual price, it asks them to put more down for the same quality difference as they always get.

Maybe I’m biased because I’m so used to handheld games right now, so I’ve been buying less expensive games, but I feel like I’m getting just as much bang for fewer bucks that way. On the other hand, I’m going through DS games so much because it’s my only current-generation console, and it’s getting more releases than my old systems right now. The galling thing is that I don’t care a whit about graphical superiority– I just want to be able to play lots of fun new games, and it won’t be long before my TV consoles are obsolete.

Occasionally, when I blog about games such as Hotel Dusk or MillionHeir that I find to be not particularly great, I find myself thinking, This game isn’t so bad. After all, I did want to finish it. And yet when it doesn’t win a place in my heart, my primary focus is on my frustrations and its flaws, perhaps because the gaming experience is inherently designed to make an enemy of the player. Getting stuck, getting frustrated, wandering around lost looking in all the wrong places: these are all part of gaming, and something would be missing without them. But players learn to think of these parts of the game as obstacles that get in their way, rather than as a cherished part of gameplay– it’s part of the attitude of tackling an enemy, and tearing the obstacles down is part of the triumph of success.

Sometimes I enjoy a game that is mediocre for the heck of it, for the satisfaction of finishing it and exploring all of it, even if it isn’t the greatest hit since Super Mario Bros 3. But often there isn’t much to say in its favour because the good part was very simply that it was a playable game, whereas there are plenty of things to criticise because games inherently throw negative things at players so that there’s something to overcome.

Perhaps I should give the games I play a rating, or at least a “recommended/not recommended” status. The trouble with that is that it’s usually far more complex. Recommended for who? Rated with what baseline? I’ve tried to stick to descriptions, but that still leaves me feeling that I’ve only conveyed part of the picture. Gaming is a holistic experience that’s very hard to break down. In the end, I think gamers just have to see for themselves.

After some poking around, I think I understand better what’s wrong with Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir. This article and its comments clued me in: it’s made, of course, by a PC games company that’s already released similar games for the PC. I should have expected that given its American origins. Of course.

The problem is, PC games of this type don’t, and probably never will, port well to consoles. I can think of two reasons: expectations and demographics.

On the expectations side, we get reactions like mine and those of the review I linked: the idea that DS games are generally more full and rich and varied than MillionHeir, which presents mostly one set of identical puzzles to wade through, a very scanty framework as an excuse for playing, and (insofar as there is a plot) no attempt at making anything endearing. This is fairly normal for PC puzzle games, the market that brought you Minesweeper, free MSN download games, the addictive but basically ugly Snood, and games where the goal is to swat flies and make them splat. Generally, when I think of pretty PC games, I think of MMORPGs, not puzzle games. Japanese puzzle games often have a nice aesthetic or at least simple cuteness, but American puzzle games often don’t try to be endearing; they’re more often humour-centric rather than focusing on genuine appeal. And the console gaming market is used to getting a full story replete with mini-games, serious variety in the challenges, and an emotionally satisfying conclusion even for the simplest of stories. Compared to the average console game, most PC puzzle games fall flat on their face for an audience that expects all of that to round out a decent game as a matter of course.

As a further barrier to sales of these games, as a commentor pointed out, the demographic for this type of game is basically your mom. I can think of no demographic less likely to own a console, unless they’ve been hooked by either curiosity or younger family members. While there are obviously plenty of exceptions, the demographic on the whole tends to think of computer games as an occasional way to pass time rather than a serious hobby, so not only are they less likely to own a console, they’re less likely to buy new games on a regular basis. I don’t think there are enough middle-aged-or-older women who buy console games to justify a port of this type of game, whereas many of them do own PCs and understand how to put in a game disc to start up a game. Even people who do take gaming seriously and know their stuff but gravitate towards this type of game are less likely to even think of looking for their type of game on a console, since they mostly find these games in the PC aisle.

As a result, most PC games aren’t going to get rave reviews from the console gaming audience, who are by and large used to routinely paying high prices for excellent games and tend to feel gypped on purchasing an inexpensive game that doesn’t have much to it. I have to wonder how PC gamers feel when faced with ports of especially complex console games, such as Final Fantasy VII. Do they react with delight at the smorgasbord of features, or is it too complex for their tastes?

I almost resent Kilroy calling me the face of destitute gaming. I mean, it’s true, I barely ever have any money, but it’s not like that’s my single most defining trait! It’s just one of the more defining features of being me, like how Scrooge McDuck is shaped by his gigantic stacks of cash, or “Tales of” main characters are defined by liking swords and being stupid.

Well, I managed to scratch together a cool three hundred dollars recently, through slightly nefarious means. This would be more fantastic if I didn’t have to immediately spend most of it on bills, which is one of the reasons Kilroy is able to go nuts on high-risk money-making plans and I’m not.

After tallying it all up in my head (which is about as mathematically sound as a Calcu-corn sometimes), I figured I had some spare change, and stopped by the local game store to engage in my favorite gamer pastime, pretending you work at the game store. It’s my belief that it’s every outgoing gamer’s duty to spend a little time while flipping through the game racks listening to other people as they ask around about various games, and offer their own dose of two parts fact, five parts opinion.

(Some folks see fit to offer seven parts opinion, but I find that putting too much blatant fanboyism in the pot tends to make everything taste like salty milk and coins.)

So I’m up at the game store, watching some folks wail on each other in Soul Calibur 4 while this little kid goes on endlessly about the game, the usual fun stuff. Eventually I end up explaining the differences between Soul Caliburs 2 and 3 to him, the poor wayward nooblet, and while my eyes skim the PS2 game rack, I notice a fucktardedly good deal: Nightmare of Druaga for four bucks! Thanks to this and Drill Dozer, I was able to quell the Spirit of Spending Too Damn Much for a little while and walk out with two doses of awesome quality for a little over ten bucks.

You gotta love the metagame. Anyway, tune in next time when I type out ten pages on why Soul Calibur 2’s Conquest mode was awesome*!

*WARNING: I might end up talking about how caterpillars are awesome instead, or end up in a screaming match with Kilroy on methods and strategies used in Track & Field for the NES.

Some friends and I have been playing old Super Nintendo ROMs, somewhat at random. We found a version of Arkanoid called Doh It Again, which is aptly-named given how often one ends up saying “d’oh” while playing it. Perhaps the most notable part, however, is that the fanfare music introducing each attempt at a level is strongly reminiscent of a song from Final Fantasy VI, so much so that I often couldn’t stop laughing every time the level restarted. We joked that they wanted to use FFVI’s music but had to pay royalties by the second and could only afford one bar of it.

Really, there’s not much else to say about Arkanoid. I can, however, attest to having seen some amusing gaming shirts in the past few days, including a “Made in the 80s” Mario shirt and a field guide to the various fungi of the Mushroom Kingdom.

My copy of Final Fantasy III for the DS had been missing for an entire year, so last night I finally broke down and bought a new one. Guess what I found today.

At least I bought some other interesting things that I didn’t already own copies of– I have been on quite the game-acquiring spree lately. For some reason, a lot of PS2 titles and a relative lot of Gamecube titles have been showing up used lately; perhaps this is a big year for people to sell their consoles. The proliferation of good DS titles has contributed to my acquisition as well. Suddenly, there’s a lot that I want. It’s been a good year, but at the same time I’m not feeling any more positive about the gaming industry than I have since the Wii era began; good games are released not in a steady flood but in fits and starts. I might as well pick up what I want while I can, to tide me over through darker times.

Perhaps the most unusual find was actually purchased not by me but by a friend; I spotted a box set of Ar tonelico, which is going for around $70 on eBay, being sold for $40. For my part, I was amused by the font on the side of the box; it was reminiscent of old Atari games. Imagine a game whose plot revolves around music, with a soundtrack of Atari 2600 chiptunes and a harem of girls with 25-pixel faces.