I recently checked out two MMO’s: Eve Online and World of Warcraft. I actually did this once already. I just downloaded the trials and see what they are about. But I never got too far in any of them. For some reason, I decided to give it a second try again. This is what came out.

Eve Online

My Podcast compare Nick Lalone is active on the Something Awful forums. He has been always telling me about the awesome thing the Goon Fleet did in this game. This is due to the fact that Eve Online gives players a lot of power to shape the world. So when enough players get together, they can seriously shake things up. So when Nick got back into Eve, I decided it would be a good idea to check back in as well.

My previous experience with Eve was very short. It basically crashed on me constantly so I wasn’t able to even finish the first few missions. This time around it ran fine. I was surprised about how the game changed. It kicks off with the amazing character creation system.

It could very well be one of the best character creation systems so far. This kind of technology could do wonders in other games as well and could be easily expanded for the production of games and animated movies.

The actual game has a slightly improved tutorial system now, so goals are clearer. I finished the basic tutorials and all the mission from the mining tutorial. I wanted to do the exploration tutorial too, but I suffered from an acute loss of interest in the game.

The weird thing is that on paper, this is totally up my alley. I enjoy Sci-Fi and space a lot. Yet, there is just to much wrong with Eve online for me to enjoy it. The character creation is awesome but completely redundant. There is a half-assed interior on space stations you can walk around with your character in. But it so obviously just a tacked-on, more awkward, resource hungry skin for the available menus that I turned it off very soon. Most of menus seem to be cluttered and overly complicated. They seem to have been created for people, who play the game very differently. Presumably, after hundreds of hours and controlling a vast commercial empire, I would see the point in all those dials and buttons. But right now, all it does is to make simple tasks very complicated. It also taints and underplays the things that should be fun and rewarding. Want to buy ammunition? You have to click to am entire tree structure of all available items. Good luck finding what you are looking for. Even when you find it, you don’t feel like doing this ever again.

And you know what? I don’t even think this complexity is necessary. I have the hunch that it’s mostly just bad interface design. So for example, the entire interface uses freely placeable windows. Cumbersome but practical if you want to display a lot of information at once. But then, I wanted to compare two items to another – a typical example where a windowed interface shines. Except I can have only one item details window open at the same time. FAIL

So the story goes like this. I learned how to mine asteroids. Mining takes a lit of time but at least I could let it run and do something else meanwhile. I then had to create a bunch of items. The tutorial also told be to get a special mineral to produce them. I couldn’t find this mineral. After a lengthy, frustrating search I just bought the mineral. This is also when I found out I have enough money to buy every item the tutorial ever requests me to manufacture. In fact, I have enough money to buy a decent selection of space ships. But I played along, I produced some items, even an entire space ship (which felt no different than manufacturing a handful of a munition). I finally was awarded with a brand new, bigger space ship. Which I could have also bought all along. And which I wasn’t allowed to pilot in the trial anyway. Yeah, it was a disappointment every step of the way.

World of Warcraft

So World of Warcraft recently got this Starter Edition deal where you are able to play the game for free until level 20. Afterwards, you get no more experience. You also can’t join guilds or trade items in any way (presumably to prevent excessive Gold Farming). I like that deal a lot and after the bland Eve Online experience, I thought I check it out.

The last time I tried World of Warcraft, I didn’t get very far. I started as an Ork Warrior and got to the third village. The repetitiveness started to show and I got out while I still could. This time around, I started a new Ork Warror and got almost up to level 20. I enjoyed the game a lot more now. I heard it’s because they streamlined a lot of the early quests with Cataclysm. They seemed less grindy to me. Sure, there was a lot of “Kill 12 boars” and fetchquests. But I think I recall my first experience to be more repetitive. It may be because they often tie the quests from each village to each other. So it’s not just “Kill 12 boars” but the entire village is being attacked by boars and the next quest is to find out where the boars come from, etc.

One of the things I enjoyed a lot were the professions. The first time around, I quit literally as I was just about to get an opportunity to learn them. This time I became a miner and a blacksmith and started to mine minerals and craft stuff. I also got into cooking and crafting first aid materials. I realized this is something I generally enjoy very much across all games – gathering materials and creating something out of them. It’s what I liked about Lost in Blue and Monster Hunter.

In terms of interface and user experience, World of Warcraft is just so much ahead of Eve Online. Especially the beginning quests are wonderfully polished. The interface is cleaned-up and easy to use. Buying things, looting dead enemies and leveling up is clearly communicated and feels pleasant and rewarding. It become completely obvious why so many people are compelled to put so much time into this.

There are downsides as well. The entire experience feels a bit on-rails. There is little evidence of players being able to somehow influence or shape this world. So all the events that inspire your quests were artificially created just for their sake. More importantly, the game is easy. There are thousands of ways to heal yourself but I never actually had to use them. This undermines all the crafting and cooking A LOT. Even if you create all the bandages and reinvigorating snacks, the best way to use them is actually to sell them. And that’s not very fun. I still died a lot of course. But it was mostly because I accidentally attracted too many enemies at once. Also, the fact that I couldn’t trade items impacted my profession as a blacksmith. There would be a lot if items I couldn’t craft because I didn’t have goods that were meant to be traded from other players. The mining profession didn’t feel very rewarding too. The mining spots at the place where I started were rare and didn’t yield anything other than copper. Finally, when I got into dungeons, I noticed that the game seems to be in dire need of healers. After 20 minutes waiting for ONE healer to show up, I decided to try a different kind of character.

I don’t know if I stay with the game. I’ll check out some other characters and professions to see how the gameplay differs. But on the other hand, I just found myself longing for Monster Hunter – a game where gathering resources feels more meaningful and the combat feels more dynamic and challenging.

Did you play any MMOs what where your impressions?

On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: Kiwi Kraut Burger Time. We are joined by the famous Mazereon from the GameFAQs and we make a delicious Monster Hunter Portable 3rd sandwich.

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
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Enjoy!

That’s one hell of a title isn’t it? Let me explain. So Clint Hawking Clint Hocking (Far Cry 2) coined the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. It’s quite a mothfull but it refers to a simple phenomenon – when the way a character is represented in the story of a game differs from the way the character behaves during gameplay. The classic example is Uncharted. Drake is a wise-cracking, slightly clumsy, funny adventurer during the cutscenes. During game-play, he becomes a mass-murderer and a super-soldier, mawing down entire armies of enemies. The fact that he kills so many people is rarely mentioned in the cutscenes.

I was playing Portal 2 recently and stumbled across a related phenomenon. I suggest calling it Meta-Ludonarrative Dissonance. It’s when the way players feel about the game’s content differs significantly from what the character the player is controlling is supposed to feel. To be fair, by definition this is a wide-spread phenomenon. Players often control characters, who find themselves in life-threatening situations. Yet the players themselves are having the time of their life.

Yet, there is often some common thread that players and player characters are sharing. Players might not be fighting for their life, yet their determination to eliminate an enemy can be at least somewhat congruent with the way a player character feels. I might not feel threatened by the terrorists but at least I’m motivated to fight them as much as the marine I’m controlling. However, I noticed that in a game like Portal 2, my own investment in the game started to diverge significantly from what Chell, the game’s main character, was supposed to feel.

Whee, “The Cake is a Lie”! LOLOLOLOLOL… oh… um… I mean… um… Yeah, we better get out here… and stuff.

In Portal 2, Chell is held captive in a huge facility controlled by the sinister AI GLADOS. GLADOS tortures Chell by putting her through a seemingly endless series of deadly tests. Especially in Portal 2, there are many dialogue sequences where it is implied that Chell finds the tests unpleasant and that she begrudges doing them. In fact, the main motivation of the character in both games is simply to escape the facility. Interestingly, this the exact opposite of what the player wants. As a a player, the tests are interesting, engaging and fun. So every time one of the characters tells me to “hold on for just a little little longer” I felt awkward. If I’m enjoying this and Chell clearly doesn’t, what am I doing here? For Chell, I must seem like some perverse psychopath – just as wicked as the AI that torments her. From this perspective, Chell becomes a tragic victim of this sick obsession that the player and their abductors are sharing. If we could only let her go, the player could stay with GLADOS and simply continue testing forever.

As fellow Indie game designer Jeroen D Stout pointed out, this exactly what happens in the co-op part of the game. There, the players are controlling robots, which were clearly created with the purpose of going through the tests. The robots seem to feel much more comfortable with this role. The dissonance is resolved.

As mentioned, some degree of Meta-Ludionarrative Dissonance is present in every game. But at least one feature of Portal 2 makes it stand out even more: the (semi-)silent protagonist. In theory, a silent protagonist should theoretically resolve the dissonance. Whatever a player thinks about the game, the silent protagonist can be assumed to think the same. It’s supposed to be a Tabula Rasa waiting to be filled with the player’s expectations. But that’s not really how it works in Portal 2. In Portal 2, Chell is a semi-silent protagonist. She may not speak but other characters around her are exceptionally vocal. Her personality is being reflected in the way they address her. Between the lines, it’s implied that Chell is determined to do whatever she can to escape the Appareture Science laboratories. It is, in fact, the entire goal of the game. We are never given the choice of staying and testing some more.

Having a vocal protagonist wouldn’t eliminate that problem. However, it could have helped establish Chell’s motivation more clearly and allow players to empathize with her. It could have also exposed the dissonance to the writers and made them modify the dialog or even the entire plot accordingly.

Meta-Ludionarrative Dissonance doesn’t specifically break the game. I was still enjoying Portal 2. But as we explore more ways of telling interactive stories and stray from the beaten path of “shoot the bad guy”, concepts like Meta-Ludionarrative Dissonance may become an increasingly important factor. Perhaps we can even learn how to use it as a tool to convey meaning.

I was wondering, did you ever encounter Meta-Ludionarrative Dissonance in a game yourself?

This summer, the Cologne Game Lab is starting the Notgames Fest. Tale of Tales have agreed to work with us on this. Instead of explaining everything, just check out our website.

http://www.notgames.colognegamelab.com/

This is my personal Blog so I wanted to write down some of the reasons why this is a project that I find very, very important. It’s because I’m worried about the future of Indie Game Design – specifically Indie Game Design in Europe. This young movement just barely got off the ground. We had a few noteworthy victories. But the big business guys are about to turn around and catch up with us. The pure creative spirit of this community is getting gooped up with exploitative business setups and single-minded shovelware similar to those that essentially killed the creative spirit of the AAA Industry.

I’m a strong believer that Indie Game Design can still save this medium. But there are three goals we need to achieve:

Is the Notgames Fest going to achieve all this? Absolutely not! But it is an opportunity to come together and start talking. It could become a fist step on this difficult journey.

So join us! Submit a game if you have one. If you don’t, just come over anyway, it won’t interfere with GDC Europe / Gamescom Schedule. It’s free – as all the best things in life are. Also, we have German beer and BBQ.

I did something… unreasonable the other day. You see, back in the days when I was 10 or so and moved from Poland and Germany, I had a board game. This was a big deal because as you might think, I was quite upset about losing ALL my Friends and ALL my Family and being in a Country where I can’t speak to anybody. To lift my spirits, my parents bought me an awesome game. A kind of game I wouldn’t be able to play in Poland. It was The Real Ghostbusters from MB.

Pretty much all MB ever did was for bringing out those really shallow games but just smother them with plastic gimmicks and colorful artwork. This game was a typical example. In fact, doing some research on this I realized that it was just a Ghostbusters re-branding of an earlier game called Which Witch? or Ghost Castle.

Gameplay-wise, the game was not much better than Snakes and Ladders. But instead of snakes you had this very elaborate plastic tower. You would throw a small plastic skull into a Ghostbusters ghost trap on top it. The skull would then come out in one of 4 openings and trigger some gimmicky traps. You would also spin a wheel of fortune, collect cards, get slimed and other things.

So of course, it was AWESOME. I loved it a lot and played it until all the playing cards wore down. One card in particular got worn down really badly. You see, in order to progress in the game, you had to collects ghosts. Each ghost was a card. Everytime you got a ghost you wound randomly draw a card from the pile of ghost cards. There were different ghosts on the ghost cards but it was all just fluff and eyecandy. The ghost cards didn’t have any hidden features. They were just points. Some illustrations on the ghost cards repeated throughout the deck. Other illustrations were unique. They were all really creative. But the one that struck my fancy was the CHICKEN GHOST. The Chicken Ghost was one of the unique ones and in each game, every time I got a my first ghost, I would go through the deck to pick the Chicken Ghost. I would mob other players if they they accidentally got the Chicken Ghost before me. It was MY ghost.

Years later I moved out from my parent’s house and sold the game on eBay. It wasn’t in a good condition anyway. But recently, for some reason I remembered the Chicken Ghost. I wanted to see how it looks like but didn’t find any illustrations online. I even asked some people selling the game on eBay but they weren’t cooperative. Finally, I decided to buy the entire, vintage board game, just to get my precious Chicken Ghost. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the elusive hero of this story.

It’s the The Maltese Falcon of my childhood, alright?

I kept my precious and gave the game away to my parents. They are running a children day care business now. A new generation will certainly appreciate some good old fluff from the 80ies/90ies.

There is a game design lesson in this. As game designers we are often focused on fancy game design ideas – rules, systems, dynamics, mechanics. When I look back on my own gaming biography, it’s rarely those things I formed an emotional attachment to. It’s rather the illustrations, animations, dialogs, music and sound effects – the superficial fluff. But that doesn’t mean you can make a game with fluff alone. The interactive, dynamic structure needs to be there in order to help players infuse the fluff with meaning. I wouldn’t pay attention to the Chicken Ghost as much if I saw it in a comic book. So I think there is a mutual relationship here. But the surprising thing for me is how easy players will form those emotional bonds. Neither the game nor the chicken ghost are exceptional pieces of art or craftsmanship. But for a few precious moments in my life, that silly card meant a lot to me.

P.S.: Aw what the hell, you know what? The chicken ghost IS actually quite well-made. I take it all back. I guess I had good taste even back then.