Let me tell you a story. I live in Germany. Games here are under harsher restrictions. Protection of youth is constitutional. When I received the German Developer Award, a journalist I’ve never met before gave a heartwarming speech on how TRAUMA shows even to the most jaded skeptics that game can be art. On the same evening, Spec Ops also won. The head of the commission to decide age ratings also gave a speech how for the first time in history of the commission there was a lengthy debate among them if they were doing youth protection or actually censoring art. This is a big deal since by the German constitution, one is mandatory while the other is illegal.

It took us a long time to get there and it was a group effort. Decades of journalists, academics and game developers doing their best to demonstrate the value in games and challenging stereotypes and misconceptions. That evening it seemed like we were finally getting somewhere. Games were discussed in mainstream newspapers in a thoughtful and appreciative manner. Game museums were being established. I applied for tax benefits as an independent artist. I was personally involved in establishing a games studies course at a local university. It took us 5 years to pull it off since the university board was so hard to convince that this was a reasonable thing to spend money on. But we were finally getting somewhere. The tables were turning. The doors were opening. It seemed like games were not for some alleged low life nerds after all. They were for everybody. They were important and valuable. They had been all along. People were coming around.

Gamergate comes in and it is a stab in the back from the very crowd we were working so hard to defend all this time. It is an attack on exactly the same people that were sacrificing careers, families and years of work for. Here were gamers hell-bent at being exactly the thing we fought so hard to prove they never were. We haven’t fought against the Jack Thompsons of this world only to have gamers issue threats of mass shootings. We haven’t been laboriously moving games journalism away from being glorified PR-megaphones only to be accused of bias by our own readers. We haven’t established game studies courses and academic conferences for gamers to denounce them as “SJW Bootcamps”. We haven’t been pushing the boundaries of what games can express for gamers to scoff at or efforts and calling them “not even a game”.

The bright future we were constructing with so much effort and against such resistance is being pillaged by its own inhabitants. You may not care about what other think about games, but we did. We fought for you. We fought because we love games. We fought because we believed in games.

To all of us who have dedicated their lives and hearts to this medium this is a tragedy and a humiliation. But most of all, it is the most crushing betrayal.

I’ve been playing Netrunner for more than 4 Months now. I have caught up with all of the released expansions so far. I went to some major tournaments. I started recording my games. I met some really great people. The game has been good to me.

My initial impression of the game has evolved a lot during this time and I started to notice some interesting patterns. I’ve been paying attention to the meta-game and dominant strategies. It seems like a lot of them seem to focus on disrupting or avoiding what the implied structure of the game is. And some of that is even intended. Let me explain.

Netrunner is a game were Runners hack into a Corporation’s servers to steal the Agendas within. Corporations install Agendas in servers to advance and score them. They try to keep the Runners out by using ICE. Runners break the ICE by using Icebreaker software. This struggle is to me the implied structure of Netrunner. This structure is something a lot of strategies seem to want to get around.

Fast Advance

“Win the game without the trouble of having to deal with your opponent.”

One of the most dominant strategies by Corporations is the so-called Fast Advance. It’s an umbrella term for various combos that allow Corporations to score agendas without having to install them into servers. Most Corps nowadays use the identity NBN with Astroscropt Progam and SanSan City Grid. But you can also go with HB and Biotic Labor or Jinteki and Trick of Light. The most agressive Fast Advance decks use a combination of them.

By not having to install cards into servers, this strategy effectively eliminates a huge portion of the game. Runners may put a lot of cards in their deck to get into Servers. But if there are no servers for them to run on, a huge portion of their deck becomes useless.

Now, it’s not necessarily that bad. Even without external servers, there are still other places for the Runner to run on. They can hack into the Corp’s hand, deck or discard pile to search for agendas there. And in fact, this is an effective strategy against Fast Advance. However, going fishing for agendas in the Corp’s hands often comes down to pure chance. Fast Advance tends to eliminate a lot of strategic nuance in favor of lucky draws.

Scorched Earth

“Win the game if you have more money than your opponent.”

One very old strategy is for the Corporation to kill the Runner with Meat Damage using Scorched Earth. It’s a cad that has been out since the Core Set. It proved to be so effective, it has become a mainstay of the game. In order to kill the Runner, the Corp needs to give them a Tag. Players have been very creative in finding out how to do this. The most successful strategies are using SEA Source or Mid-Season Replacements – both of them require the Corp to have more money than the Runner.

It is no wonder the first expansion ever printed included Plascrete Carapace, an armor for the Runner to defend against Scorched Earth. Every Runner deck has to include at least 2 of them ever since. But since they can’t be tutored (yet), this defense is still quite unreliable.

For a Runner, this can feel very frustrating. You might be on your way to unravel the Corp’s security system. But then suddenly they show you 3 cards and you lose the game. No question about it. No warnings. Nothing you can do about it. Just a binary “you lose the game”. Some decks may even set up weak security on purpose to lure Runners in. So Runners will begrudgingly add their 2 Plascretes in every deck they ever build just because Scorched Earth is a thing that can happen. And then comes the sting when you draw one of them and you know your opponent is actually playing Fast Advance. Bergh.

The flip-side is that if a Runner knows a deck is heavily focused on this play, they can play around it by not running and collecting money instead. This turns Netrunner the most painfully boring waiting game.

The Combo

“Play three cards from your entire deck for free to win the game. As a bonus you get to have a 5-minute monologue explaining how exactly you won and how awesome you are.”

In my opinion, the worst thing that happened to Netrunner recently was the Power Shutdown + Accelerated Diagnostics combo. Power Shutdown makes the Corp discard cards in order to trash a Runner’s tools. But some players find out you can use this card to trash YOUR ENTIRE DECK into your discard pile. Usually this would mean you would lose next turn – having no cards to draw is a loss condition for the Corporation. But then they use Jackson Howard to pick 3 cards from archives and put them into the empty deck. Finally, they play Accelerated Diagnostics to play the 3 selected cards for free, winning the game.

How exactly they win the game is depends on the actual deck. Players have been very creative in figuring out how to win the game with 3 cards. The classic is SEA Source, 2x Scorched Earth. But some more elaborate combos manage to get more clicks, repeat the combo to do some more fancy stuff. Some decks actually manage to score 7 agenda points in one turn out of hand.

The frustrating thing is that because the combo lets you access any card in your entire deck, it doesn’t take too many cards to initiate it. A lot of the combos are also pretty cheap to pull off. So the game devolves into the Corp doing nothing except drawing cards and collecting money until they initiate the combo, play solitaire for a minute or two and finally declare they won the game.

Luckily, the combo never got too popular and you don’t see it that often nowadays. If you do, it’s makes you feel like you just wasted a lot of time.

Anarchs

Anarchs – Disruption by Design

Interestingly, an entire Runner faction also focuses on disrupting the core structure of the game. Instead of breaking ICE with Icebreakers, Anarchs use cards like Parasite and Datasucker to destroy ICE completely. They also have a lot of cards that can mill the Corporation to make them lose by running out of cards. So far, the latter hasn’t developed into a reliable deck type yet, but we are getting there. While certainly not as disruptive as some of the above examples, it suggests that this play style may be partially intended by the game’s designers.

Disruption by Design

I am convinced that combos like Power Shutdown + Accelerated Diagnostics have not been intended by the game’s designers. I also suspect that certain Fast Advance or Scorched Earth strategies have been pushed further than the original game design anticipated. Many of the above examples reduce the strategic complexity of Netrunner to a binary “Are you doing that thing or are you not doing that thing?” – the classic example of a Degenerative Strategy. On the other hand, some of those ideas are actually rooted in the game’s design. Scorched Earth has been purposefully designed to win games in a surprising fashion. Fast Advance is a core concept or else there wouldn’t be that many cards, that enable it. The entire faction of Anarchs is based on the idea of disruption.

It occurred to me that the premise of disruption is actually what motivates a lot of players in games. Players rarely play RPGs actually to role-play. They want to level up their characters to ridiculous levels and equip them with the most excessive gear to completely destroy whatever the game intended as a challenge. A posteriori, this is then labeled as “freedom of choice” or “creative expression”. Players often don’t want to just overcome challenges. They want to overcome the game as a whole.

There are two ways to spin it. On the one hand this can be seen as a creative force. Players aren’t sheep. They aren’t content with being slaves to the systems of games. They analyze the systems and exploit loopholes to their advantage. It can be seen as an act of creative subversion, of rebellion even.

On the other hand, especially in context of multi-player games, this can be also seen as a very juvenile attitude. Nitpicking the exact wording of every card to squeeze out that crucial advantage. Second-guessing and smart-assing your way to not only win but also to satisfy a desperate, egoistic desire to feel superior. It’s the attitude of “I didn’t say >Simon Says<". It's when you say to an 8-year-old "I don't want to hear a single word from you!" and they say "baaaah!" because that's not a word.

Luckily, over time the community itself develops a sense for boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. The lack of staying power for the Power Shutdown + Accelerated Diagnostics combo shows that even the most win-oriented players aren’t happy when they win by playing essentially a game solitaire. Deck types like The Read Coats show that you can be incredibly annoying without disrupting the implicit idea of what the game is about. And yes, most of those strategies have counters – either in form of strategies or new cards released in expansions. But the dynamics of the Netrunner meta made me reconsider my understanding of Degenerative Strategies as a game designer. I’ve been used to think that they are bad and something to avoid. I’ve come to realize that they may actually be part of the reason why we play games at all – for better or worse.

I recently got into Android Netrunner. It is a card game by Richard Garfield of Magic: The Gathering Fame. It used to be a Trading Card Game itself but never succeeded in that format. It was recently re-released as a so-called “Living Card Game” and is currently enjoying a great deal of attention. I noticed that especially Game Designers are quite fascinated by it. Here are some of my observations.

The first time I heard about the game from Nels Anderson on the Idle Thumbs podcast. It caught my attention but not enough to follow it up. In the subsequent months I stumbled over it a couple of times until I gave in and bought the Core Set. Ever since I started visiting the local Netrunner meet-up and began collecting the expansions. I even started playing the game on OCTGN. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that in the meantime, Nels himself started his own Netrunner podcast on Idle Thumbs. Also, Quintin Smith from Shut Up And Sit Down seems to have caught the Netrunner virus as well.

Theme and Flavor

To me, one of the core Aspects of Netrunner is its elegant portrayal of its theme and the rich flavor it radiates. Netrunner is a card game duel very much like Magic: The Gathering. But instead of generic fantasy wizards, it portrays a much more specific Cyberpunk world. One player plays a hacker. The other player plays an evil corporation. The corporation protects their computer servers with security software to fulfill their mischievous secret plans. The hacker’s job is to hack into the servers and to steal the corporation’s secrets. This may not sound that different from Magic, but the actual execution of that setting really hits home. In Magic, the theme is really just a thin, loose veneer over an intricate rule set. It is never really evident how individual cards really portray a confrontation between wizards. What actually happens when you play a land card? Where do all those weird creatures come from? What does it mean when that bird does 2 damage and how come just one of those birds can kill two trained soldiers? The Magic experience is not caring about such minutia and enjoying the interplay of rules while soaking in the vague hint of the fantasy setting.

Netrunner offers an experience where rules and setting are much more tightly interwoven. For Hackers, cards represent their software, their hardware and their underworld connections. For Corporations, the cards represent their security software, their secret agendas or expert employees. Various game elements have special names. The corporation’s draw deck is called “R&D” because that’s where all the new stuff is coming from. The discard pile is called “Archives”, the hand cards are called “HQ”, cards on the table are placed in “Remote Servers”. It sounds goofy and confusing at first, but it actually contributes to a thematically more meaningful gameplay.

All elements of the game have themed naming conventions. They seem goofy at first, but they show how well the the rules and theme are interwoven.

One interesting improvement of the new edition over the original TCG is the inclusion of factions. As a hacker, you are not just an anonymous hacker, you have an identity which belongs to one of 4 factions. You can be the Akira-esque child hacker Chaos Theory, part of the playful group of “Shapers”. She can install more programs than others and can use a smaller deck of cards because she is still a child playing around with just her favorite playthings. Or you can be Andromeda a high-class “Criminal”, who starts the game with 9 instead of 5 cards because she is exceptionally wealthy and has a great amount of resources at her disposal. Depending on the identity, the play style and the actual deck can be completely different. At the same time, the identities also bring with them a specificity to the portrayed conflict.

But in the end, what really gets me is the rich flavor the individual cards bring with them. Flavor can be a difficult concept to grasp – often it can be one of those “I know it when I see it” aspects of a game. Netrunner oozes Flavor. Each card is incredibly evocative – either by portraying the world Netrunner plays in or by depicting a very specific story beat. Together they are capable of stinging together surprisingly coherent narratives. A hacker may start a self-destructive drug-induced Stim Hack to get an edge over a particularly well defended server, sustain brain damage the process and use Public Sympathy to get back on her feet. Meanwhile characters like Director Haas from the Corporation “Haas Bioroid” are depicted on multiple cards fleshing out the lore of a ruthless CEO, who always gets what she wants except when it comes to her spoiled Playboy son.

The Hostile Takeover took too long and was prevented with an Inside Job run on a server that was previously thought of as hack-proof. How will the board of executives react to the bad news?

Fundamentally, none of this new or unique. The exceptional thing about it is the actual execution. The pieces seem to fall together much more easily than in TCGs like Magic. The effect can be intoxinating.

Asymetry

One extraordinary aspect of the game’s design is its inherent asymmetry. The two players don’t just play different factions, they actually play according to completely different rules with different goals. Corporations secure servers, hackers break into them. One player builds a puzzle. The other player has to solve it. It is a game design paradigm reminiscent of Little Big Planet or Jason Rohrer’s The Castle Doctrine except that the design and testing of a level are framed as an confrontational duel and happen simultaneously.

Depending on which side you play as, the game experience can be radically different… at yet they share common themes.

A friend of mine tried the game but was put of by it, specifically by the asymmetry. It struck me that this particular feature could be one of the reasons why the game is more appealing to Game Designers. To some extent, it can be much easier to design and balance a duel game where both players have the same abilities. As soon as one player has an ability the other one doesn’t, you need to counter-balance. Not only do you have to preserve a sense of fairness, it is also important to convey a comparable level of depth and engagement in what is essentially a second iteration on the game. It would be easy to accidentally end up with a game where one payer does all the work and has all the fun while the other just blindly draws and plays cards. So when a game comes along that successfully pulls of that difficult balance act, it often enjoys is a certain sense of respect and awe from the game design connoisseurs. I believe that this is one of the reasons for Starcraft’s sustained success and it think it plays a role in how Netrunner is percieved.

Affordances

As a side note, there is minor thing that struck me about Netrunner. I really appreciate how Richard Garfield leverages the affordances of playing cards as objects to design his games. In Magic, the tap mechanic was a clever and simple way to indicate if a card’s ability has been used. In Netrunner, cards protecting the server are placed sideways, indicating they are in the way of the invading player. The Corporation plays all cards face-down because they are secretive. The cards are then dramatically revealed during runs not unlike the trap mechanic in Yu-Gi-Oh. The hidden information introduces bluffing as a cornerstone of the corporation strategy.

“Ummm…. I mean I rez that ice.”

There is also a beautifully elegant way of tracking a player’s “health points” – they are represented by the number of cards the player has in their hand. If a player gets injured, they have to drop cards randomly. This has the potential to ruin a carefully developed strategy, so even on an emotional level, it actually “hurts” the victim. It also makes healing more straight forward – just find a way to draw more cards. On a practical level, it is not even necessary to keep track of some health-points or health-tokens. The number is always evident for both players.

Meta Game

One of the most striking differences between the 1st edition of Netrunner and the most recent one is it’s publishing format. The original edition was a Trading Card Game very much like much like Magic – players bought a starter pack which they could upgrade by buying booster packs. All packs contained random cards. So each player would have a different pool of cards at their disposal, which they would develop strategies around. This eventually was supposed in creating more variety. Magic was a game where the surprise and novelty came often from dealing with cards you’ve never seen before. The new Netrunner edition is being released as a so-called “Living Card Game” – a new model introduced by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games. It seems to be an evolution of the recent board game success Dominion. Players start out by buying a large, board-game sized (and priced) box containing a wide selection of specifically selected cards. With those cards, they are able to play a completely satisfying game. There are even enough cards inside to mix things up – to construct different decks that keep the experience fresh and new even using the same set. However, Fantasy Flight also releases expansions for the game. Unlike traditional board game expansions, they are actually very cheap (around 10 eur) and small. Also, they are released on a frequent schedule – a new pack is released every month or so.

This solves a certain problem that occurred with Trading Card Games like Magic. Especially with the advent of eBay, it was possible to buy yourself a victory. If you invested enough money, you could get this specific combination of rare out-of-print cards that would basically guarantee victory in most cases. As the number of cards increased, this got really out of hand in Magic. Soon the creators started restricting which cards are legal in tournaments or even went on creating tournament formats like Limited, where you would buy random card packs at the tournament and construct decks out of those.

The Living Card Format sidesteps that issue altogether by making all of the cards readily available. There are no random packs. So if a card turns out to be exceptionally powerful, it is quite easy to just get that expansion and start using it yourself. Of course, this is still a way to pull money out the player’s pockets, but it no longer follows that Las Vegas philosophy of an endless money sink. Now, it is much more reminiscent of a TV series, where you would buy the next season on DVD because you really liked the previous one.

As a additional side effect, there seems to be a lot more focus on the meta game. Be it on podcasts, websites, YouTube channels or in conversations at a local game store, the Netrunner community is in the state of a constant discourse over strategies and deck building philosophies. Cards, decks and strategies go in and out of fashion. Of course, this is again no different from Magic. However, in Magic the meta-game was something with a high entry threshold – in the form of the sheer number of cards and the financial burden associated in getting them. The meta-game in Netrunner accessible, even more accessible than the meta-game of something like Starcraft 2. Even the most advanced tournament decks are still playing a lot of cards from the core set. Just after 3 games I was able to at least partially follow YouTube recordings of regional matches.

The Living Card format seems to mirror a certain sentiment among the digital games. It is a design philosophy that voluntarily avoids exploitative Whale-farming strategies that seek at creating hyper-obsessive players to fuel their business model. Instead, it focuses on more healthy, small-scale, content-centered communities. It benefits from a wider causal appeal, lower entry thresholds and more world-of-mouth publicity. Because the strategy puts the game content rather than the business model in the spotlight, I believe it is coincidentally also a philosophy game designers appreciate in particular.

Thinking Man’s Game

Finally, there is one aspect of Netrunner that stands out when compared to Magic. It requires a lot more strategic thinking. This is something the Terminal 7 podcast already commented on. Magic is 70% deck building and 30% actual play. Netrunner is 30% deck building and 70% actual play. Magic can be a very streamlined experience. Draw a card, tap a card, play a card, next turn. A good deck will play itself. The mana curve often trims down decision trees into obvious low-hanging fruits. Of course, this makes the game so addictive at the same time. The recent Hearthstone game by Blizzard expands that concept even further – it is essentially an even more streamlined Magic. It’s Magic Blitz. Netrunner, is everything but that. Turns in Netrunner feel slower. Actions play out over multiple turns. Strategies can take a whole game to pay out. Each turn consist of 3 – 4 individual actions. Each of these actions can be chosen from a whole menu of available ones. One turn you will play a magic-style draw a card, play a card game. Another turn you won’t draw cards at all and just save up money. Another turn may take ages as you carefully inch yourself forward into a fortress of a server.

Those guys are in for a looooong game. Oh wait!

And then suddenly an unexpected card appears and you just can’t believe it’s over like that. It is not a streamlined experience but a complex Breakbeat Staccato Improv piece in which you are at the instrument. It can feel awkward and daunting at first. But it is also immensely satisfying once you find your jam. And every game feels completely different.

The Netpicks

Among all the praise there are also some negative aspects to Netrunner. I don’t want to go too deep into them at this point since this article is so long as it is. But here are some bullet points:

• Core Set has TCG leftovers – In all of the expansions you always get 3 copies of every card. That’s because when you build decks, the maximum number of copies of a card you can include is 3. However, the core set is an exception. It contains some cards with just 1 or 2 copies. If you want to build build decks more freely with those cards you need to buy multiple core sets… but then you have to pay quite a sum and end up with a lot of unnecessary cards. It just feels like a step back to the Rare/Uncommon/Common random card pack paradigm of Trading Card Games. Also, it hurts my OCD. The Core Set should have had 3 copies of each card or at least there should have been a “Deckbuilder’s Kit” expansion.

• Hard to Learn – Asymmetry, Flavor and Strategic Depth are great. But they also mean the game is hard to learn. Both sides play according to different rules. And you need to learn both to play just one side. What was “Grip” and “Stack” again? Why do the same things have different names for Corp and Runners? Even if you get the rules, it can be initially difficult to figure out what to do. Magic’s streamlined game-play meant it was easier to learn. With Netrunner It can take a whole evening and a few games to start figuring things out. There is a good manual and a video tutorial. But a game of this complexity requires an extra mile or two.

• Long – Some Netrunner games can last over an hour. There can be phases where it feels like neither player is getting anywhere. This causes some difficulties in tournaments. Again, Magic has a certain advantage there. It is shorter and pacing seems to be more consistent.

• Baroque – I mentioned the elegance of some elements. Not all of them feel as elegant. Some rules and systems feel outright baroque. The Trace system is a good example. One could easily imagine the game working similarly well without it. It could have been a new mechanic in an expansion. It’s not necessarily bad. Once you figure it out, it opens up another strategic dimension. It just doesn’t feel as essential and integrated as other elements and it slows down learning.

• Catching up can be Daunting – While the meta-game discourse is easy to get into compared to Magic, there is still a certain threshold to it. New expansions are released frequently. As a newcomer, one can get a bit overwhelmed with all the packs you need to buy in order to catch up to the rest of the scene. Again, it feels like getting into a TV series that is well into the 3rd season or so and you have to binge-watch to be able to discuss the current episode with your co-workers. However, unlike Magic, it is actually possible to eventually get there without ruining yourself. And in the end, it’s more of a psychological pressure. Deck-building is far less crucial in Netrunner than in other TCGs, so a newcomer can just play the core set decks and do perfectly well against opponents with a larger card library.

• Doesn’t Draft so Well – I mentioned Limited formats like Booster Drafts. Those don’t work so well in Netrunner. Which is a bit sad, because I really enjoy them. Fantasy Flight is working on a workaround and I’ve seen some gaming stores coming up with their own solutions. But it’s not a natural way to enjoy this game.

As it’s often the case, the nitpicks make the game actually a bit more attractive to me. I find myself thinking about how to fix the issues. How would I tweak the rules to speed things up? How would I design a good tutorial? Which rules would I explain first? I’m not the only one – some people even build tutorial decks to simplify teaching the game to players.

As already mentioned, I think there are multiple aspects of Netrunner that end up making it especially appealing to Game Designers and Game Design Connoisseurs. It’s asymmetric, complex and deep and yet compact and elegant in some regard but then long and awkward while oozing with theme and flavor. It is casually accessible because you can just buy it in a box like a board game and yet it requires an above-average dedication when learning to play it. And once you start playing it on OCTGN you realize you’re dealing with a beautiful train wreck and enjoying it thoroughly. So chug that Diesel and jack into that rabbit hole. It’s going to be a wild run.

Here are some thoughts I had recently. We are quick to demonize Free to Play, myself included. But what we tend to forget that the “traditional” model of upfront payment has severe issues as well. Those issues have been detrimental to how games have developed and are still detrimental to what games are today.

But before we go into it, here is a recent presentation by Jonathan Blow that summarizes quite well the argument.

Mr. Blow does an interesting analogy here. He compares the issues of F2P games to TV dramas from the 70ies and 80ies like Knight Rider, A-Team or The Six Million Dollar Man. He claims that commercial breaks and syndication rules made those shows shallow and exploitative. He claims it took the Cable TV Network HBO, which got rid of syndication and commercials in favor of a subscription model, in order to elevate TV dramas onto a more serious, artistically ambitious level of today. He cites Game of Thrones, The Wire and (I think) Sopranos as examples of “good” modern TV shows. For him those are good dramas because, unlike the previous TV dramas, the world does not reset at the end of each episode. Rather, the story keeps developing from episode to episode which results in events having staying consequences and characters changing over time. Additionally, they resort less to “cheap tricks” like cliffhangers to retain the audience past a commercial break. Finally, they are generally more serious and less campy in nature.

He argues that the early TV dramas are like F2P games. Because of their business model, F2P games are shallow and exploitative. They HAVE to apply certain tricks in order to be commercially viable. Therefore, their ability to be artistically meaningful is inherently diminished.

To be fair, I made a similar argument where I mocked the very idea of TRAUMA being a Zynga-style Facebook game. To some extend I do agree with Mr. Blow.

But there are at least two major issues with Blow’s argument, the first being historical in nature. While HBO has no doubt been an influence, claiming it was HBO that changed TV dramas is a bit of a revisionist history. In fact, a lot of modern TV dramas still do have commercials and are still used for syndication. Even going back to the 90ies it’s easy to point out TV dramas that did not exhibit the exploitative features mentioned by Mr. Blow. Shows like The X-Files or Babylon 5 were syndicated and had commercials. But they had also arcs that spanned multiple seasons and often dealt with serious, mature topics. What changed between the 70ies and today is not so much the business model but the mindset of TV producers and the expectation of the audience. A major catalyst for this change was the TV Series Twin Peaks. It combined the format of a police investigation series with the season-spanning arcs of Soap Opera. It was also directed by a film director which introduced a major shift towards film-like aesthetics and themes. Twin Peaks wasn’t the only reason. However it contributed to a gradual evolution of the genre: the audience started seeking out similar dramas and TV networks started being more comfortable with a smarter and more mature approach to make their series.

Twin Peaks and the discovery of nuance and depth – the maturation of TV drama was not brought about by the change of business strategies.

So a particular business model may modulate but doesn’t necessarily completely dictate the potential for artistic value of an individual work. A willing creator ought to be able to use the limitations of it’s medium to bring out it’s potential. As Nietszche put it so well, art is always about “dancing in chains”. The particular issues of the F2P model seem to me to have more to do with the mindset, the goals and aspirations of the people making those games. One could argue that the reason why most F2P games have little artistic ambitions is because it is harder to make those kinds of games artistic. But correlation does not mean causation. It could be just as well the other way around: because there is a lack of successful precedence, making artistic F2P games is hard.

This begs a question – are there perhaps ways in which the “standard” upfront payment model business model for games inhibits artistic expression? We consider this way of monetizing games for granted. What if we have become blind to it’s shortcomings. Or what if we have found ways to deal with the shortcomings so they don’t even occur to us?

This ties neatly into a different analogy that struck me recently – many modern games (and increasingly other media) bear striking resemblances to US-style superhero comics. On the one had, of course, they actually ARE adaptation of said comics. But in a more fundamental way, the way they market themselves and the way storytelling is structured resembles those comics.

Superhero comics were often designed to create an upfront outrage and sensation – a hype. This is perhaps most evident in the way the design of the covers. Quite often the covers actually had a vital panel of the story on the front showing a major, dramatic scene from the current issue. It hinted at some profound changes – important characters dying, marrying or being in incredible situations. This resulted in a “hook” where an audience might be intrigued in finding out how the details of how the incredible event comes to be and how it eventually resolves. Sensationalist content is being front-loaded to create a high anticipation for what is to come.

SHOCKING BRAND NEW ISSUE!!!

This is, of course, a direct result of the business model. The goal is to make the audience pay for the content before they actually consume the content. In order to do so, comics aim at convincing their audience that the content will be well worth their money. They do so by giving the audience samples of the content and they – of course – don’t pick just any part of the story but the most shocking part.

But this has repercussions for the actual storytelling. Every single story needs such a hook. It needs to be crass and “in your face” so they can put it on the cover. Characters need to follow well established stereotypes so every dummy gets what this is about just with one image from the cover.

More insidiously, there is no need to actually provide anything beyond that front-loaded content. By the time the audience buys into the content, the creator already got all they needed from them. As long they deliver that one money shot that was promised nobody can complain. So the rest of the story can be just unsubstantial dressing. With a lot of those superhero stories, you get the impression that the writers first came up with a hook and then reverse-engineered some asinine rationalizations for why it happened and some half-hearted, stereotypical resolution. Ideally, the resolution would revert everything to normal so they can do it again in the future. Superman died about twice now. Batman broke a spine and fully recovered. How many Robins did we go through now?

This kind of storytelling is not unique for comics. Films rely more and more on hype generated by trailers. Many scenes in movies are nowadays made specifically so they can be put later in a trailer. Do you know that feeling where you leave a cinema and feel like the trailer gave away the whole movie? This may not be because the trailer went overboard, it may be because the movie was made just to create the trailer and the rest was just filler.

This is also related to the issue of sequels. It’s difficult to hook an audience with a new, unknown setting and characters. It’s easy to hook them with a follow-up to a story they are already familiar with.

And no medium is as much plagued with sequels as videogames. Almost every major release nowadays has a number greater than 3 in the title. Because it is much more difficult to sample a piece of interactive experience than to sample a panel from a comic book, videogames rely heavily on the establishment of franchises and genres to provide those hooks necessary for the business model. The rhetoric being always – “it’s like that thing you know but better”. It’s zombies but in space. It’s soldiers but with dogs. It’s that big game from last year but now even larger.

Top 10 selling games of Q1 2013. ALL of them are sequels. (source: http://www.vgchartz.com/)

The recent trend of crowdsourcing can be seen as yet another escalation of this model – no longer do we sell games, we sell mere promises of games. We finally got rid of the filler and everything else. We just sell the hooks now. Product may or may not be included in the box.

The results of this market philosophy is profound in any medium. Because what is lost along the way is modestly, subtlety and surprise. All three are difficult and precious in videogames and modern cinema. My best movie experiences were the ones where I had no idea what a movie was about going in. The reason why retro games often feel so fresh is because their modest aesthetics often conceal their richness. Perhaps this is why we are obsessed with avoiding spoilers noways. The only surprises stories provide have become precious and fragile. One sentence can make the added value of actually going to the movie evaporate.

To be fair, I have been harping on comics, movies and games. But it’s worth pointing out that both have their fans, who very much appreciate those very qualities I have been criticizing. I can appreciate them myself. This is analogous to, as Blow mentioned, the people who have fun playing Candy Crush or Farmville. The fact that people like something doesn’t mean that there is nothing wrong with it and we still may want to look for ways to offer more ambitious alternatives.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. As already mentioned, a business model may modulate but not dictate how we utilize a given medium. Going back to comics, the US Superhero comics were just one subset of a much larger genre of comics. European comics, for example, shared many similarities with their US counterparts, but often chose a less upfront appearance. The stories were longer and not necessarily focused that much on a central hook, allowing for more surprise and wonder. Nowadays we have a wide selection of sophisticated graphic novels next to the old superhero mainstays. Superhero comics have evolved themselves.

Tintin covers – evocative but a lot more restrained.

So there is hope that games can mature in the same way TV series and comics did. To some extent we already see it happening. Blow mentioned Going Home as an example. I, for one, am looking forward to his own game the Witness.

Shallow and exploitative games are not just the result of a business model. It takes a certain mindset to create them. It takes a different kind of mindset to consciously resist and overcome the corruptive aspects of a particular business model. There are good reasons to be critical of the hubris and exploitation of F2P games. But it is wrong to categorically dismiss the entire idea as evil at it’s core. A similar evil lives in the heart of every kind of economy. Even it it sounds ridiculous at this point, In the future, game designers may find a way to use F2P to pursue more artistic goals.

Here is an interesting UI issue I’ve encountered developing a prototype: what is a good and easy way to make AI characters perform things together. I’ve crowd-sourced this question on Twitter to look for examples in other games and realized that the question requires some explanation. So let me clarify:

There are numerous games where you control not a single character but a whole group of characters: Lemmings, XCOM, Starcraft, Pikmin, Final Fantasy, etc. What I noticed it that most of the time, the kind of orders you can give to your team members are given to one single team member at a time. The interfaces are great at telling guy A to do X and then guy B to do Y. What I’m looking for are interfaces for making guy A and guy B do X together. Here are some examples and how they do and do not qualify:

• XCOM – Am obvious example of a game that lets you control a team but doesn’t have any orders that are done together. You just have guys just doing their own things simultaneously. The closest the game gets at cooperation is when one soldier heals another. But even in those cases – the person, who is being healed actually doesn’t have to do anything to cooperate. You can potentially heal a teammate WHILE they are running or shooting at somebody.

• Pikmin – Pikmin does have activities that require multiple units to cooperate. Most notably, you need to send out a certain number of Pikmin to carry around heavy objects together. Technically, you still give orders to individual Pikmin. It’s just that they do nothing until a certain minimum number of Pikmin have been assigned to a task. The reason why the example is still not useful in my case is because the roles within a task and the Pikmin themselves are interchangeable. When carrying around large objects for every Pikmin within that sub-group does the same thing. Also, you can’t discern or select individual Pikmin – not very well at least. So you would have a hard time to use that interface to staff a rowing team where you need pick the strongest of your guys to do the rowing and the lightest of your guys to be the coxswain.

• Starcraft – Starcraft let you identify and select individual units. In most cases the orders you give don’t require cooperation, though. There are a few exceptions. Some units can build and repair buildings together. Again, as in Pikmin, Starcraft doesn’t actually discern individual roles in a task either. So when multiple units repair something, they are all doing the same generic repairing action. Units don’t depend on each other or interact with each other when doing a task.

Examples of Activities

To clarify the problem, here are some examples for cooperative tasks that might be difficult to model in the above games:

• Climbing a Wall – Climbing a wall usually requires the cooperation of two people. One person does the climbing while another person belays them. Who is doing the climbing and who belays them is very important and should be a thing that the player has control over. More importantly, throughout a mountaineering expedition, who climbs and who belays changes constantly. So you need a flexible interface for being able to decide quickly. This is actually the thing I was trying to model when I stumbled over the problem. I already previously had other activities where I didn’t necessarily NEED cooperation but wished I had an easy UI solution to allow for it.

  

  You know, for all the climbing that you do in games, there is an astonishing lack of belaying.

• A Road Trip – Usually, on a long road trip, there is one person driving, one person taking care of navigation and the rest (if there is any) is resting in the back seats. As with climbing, the roles here change constantly throughout the trip. As with climbing, who does what can have important consequences for group dynamics and how the trip plays out.

  

  Which seat can I taaaaaaake?

• Surgery – During a Surgery there are multiple roles to fulfill. There is a Senior Surgeon, Resident Surgeons, an Anesthesiologists, a Scrub Nurse, Circulating Nurses, Students etc. On especially long and complicated operations these can change throughout an individual operation. But more often, the roles just change from surgery to surgery. A Student on one major operation may end up being the Resident Surgeon on a minor operation. Who does what is essential and often lies at the core of the many medical TV dramas.

  

  If I learned anything from TV it’s that one of the most important factors for the outcome of a surgery is not so much competence but who sleeps with whom.

• A Construction Site – Construction sites have multiple people fulfilling multiple roles. Machines need to be operated. Things need to be carried, dug out, filled in, painted, erected, demolished, etc. Because those activities are usually heavy duty, a lot of them are most efficiently and safely performed in groups – like carrying heavy things or filling a sack with sand. Also, the roles constantly change. You don’t have just that one guy, who always carries things. He might be unloading a truck first but then move on to erect a scaffolding. Evolving priorities and individual skills are important and have to be considered when deleting tasks.

  

  Whatever those guys are doing, it doesn’t look like a one-man-job.

• Hanging a Picture on a Wall – There are multiple examples for relatively simple, everyday activities that require at least two people to cooperate. Hanging a picture on a wall requires one person to hold the picture while another checks if it is level and draws in marks to where to hammer in the nails. Or you’ll have one person carrying a heavy item while another holds open the doors for them. Setting up tents or folding blankets – all of these require people to work together and often end up being relationship-forming events in film or literature. Consider the cliche of the how young couple renovating a room and splashing each other with paint during a romantic good times montage.

  

  “Teeheehee! We are so in love with each other! Look at us making a huge mess.”

All of these are very straight-forward, common examples of cooperation which are surprisingly under-represented in games. Interestingly, they often end up being catalysts for social interaction. So modelling them in a game should be an attractive thing to try. It is surprising that we apparently don’t have that many examples of games trying this. Instead games either show them from an individual’s perspective (you snipe while the AI does the spotting for you) or they limit themselves to model actions that don’t require two people to directly interact. IThis simple UI issue might be actually related to why games tend to have a rather autistic view on social modeling.

Design Patterns

However, people were so nice to point out some titles to me. With the examples I already had, here are some design patterns I noticed that frequently come up when games at least try to model some form of cooperative interaction. There is no ideal solution so far. But each of the patterns has it’s own strengths and weaknesses:

• Jobs – Some games seem to solve interaction by defining jobs for individual team members. World of Tanks, for example, lets you crew a vehicle with multiple roles: Commander, Gunner, Driver, Radio Operator and Loader. It displays a list of slots that you can fit crew members into. This is generally a useful design pattern that can be applied to a lot of cases. However, it comes with a set of expectations. It already assumes that you always want to drive a tank. World of Tanks is not a game where driving a tank is one of multiple activities you can do. It also assumes that in most cases the crew for a tank tends to stay the same for a long time – you will change crews perhaps every half an hour or so at most. So the process is awkward – you select a crew slot, you dismiss a crew member, confirm a dialogue box, select the empty crew slot, select “Recruit”, chose a new person from the barracks. There are multiple clicks and dialogue boxes necessary to make even the simplest changes. To change crew members every minute, you would need something more streamlined.

  

  Defining a team in World of Tanks. Comprehensible but inflexible and somewhat cumbersome.

• Waiting Mode – I’ve seem some games that allow two people to cooperate using a system designed to control individuals. They do so by creating intermediate commands. You put one team member into a sort of “waiting mode”. Then you command another team member to walk to and “team up” with them. Pikmin is an obvious example. Your Pikmin gather around an object and wait there until enough Pikmin have gathered to carry it. I think I’ve seen a similar pattern in a Tactical JRPG, but I can’t recall which one (can anyone help me out here?). This works quite well to infuse cooperative elements into an otherwise individual-based UI. Unlike the Job-pattern it allows players to formulate tasks and jobs ad-hoc rather than the system always assuming you do one thing over and over again. The reason why I’m wary with using this pattern is that because the it’s essentially a crutch to have cooperative elements in a UI not designed with them in mind. So involves this awkward 2-step process. It necessarily creates a situation where team members stand around doing nothing while you navigate another person in place to join them. It can be also difficult to visualize this and explain to the player what they need to do in order to complete the process.

  

  Pikmin team up to carry things. Quite flexible but communicating the requirements to the player can be difficult.

• Stations – Another design pattern that I’ve sometimes seen is to define jobs and tie them to physical places. FTL is an excellent, recent example for this. You see the schematic view of a spaceship. Each room of the ship corresponds to a job. Whoever sits in the cockpit becomes the pilot. Whoever sits in the engineering room becomes the engineer. The game often revolves about constantly delegating crew members to different tasks as the situation evolves and priorities change. This is certainly a more flexible and streamlined pattern than the Job-pattern in World of Tanks. However, it also comes with a set of expectations. Because it is related to the Job-pattern, it expects certain jobs to be always present. You always fly a ship in FTL. It also expects a 1:1 correspondence with places and activities. For example: How would you model an away mission where you can either talk to an alien, scan them with a Tricorder or shoot them?

  

  Two guys fend off a boarding party in the weapons room while the pilot flies the ship and an engineer keeps the shields up. FTL does feature some flexible cooperation but activities are tied to the layout of the ship.

MOAR EXAMPLES PLZ!

I have an idea how I might be able to solve this issue which I need to try out first. But in the meantime I’m still looking for examples. So please, if you know any game that have you control a team of people that performs tasks together, let me know. Additional examples or variations in the three above patterns are certainly welcome as well!