Monday Mailbag: full body controls, racism, forums, education, & design docs

I have this crazy backlog of messages in the Mailbag. It would be much much worse if 2/3 of the messages that come in weren’t some variant of “Please don’t post this to your blog.” So I am thinking of making the mailbag a regular Monday thing — both so that greater variety of stuff gets sent in, and so that I clear it out more regularly.

Hey Raph, I’m a big fan of yours since the UO and SWG days and this is the first time I wrote to you. What do you honestly think of MMO games that uses full body motion sensors? Do you think it will be the future of gaming? A lot of hardcore gamers have trouble with a healthy lifestyle (since mmo requires a ton of your time planted in front of the TV/PC not moving) and an mmo/game that requires you to exert some physical effort (by using full body to control your game avatar) would be a great way to have fun as well as keep in shape. Nintendo wii’s nunchuck controls is the start of this great idea. I hope someone would bring this great idea further.

Well, I don’t doubt that it’s coming. The success of the Wii definitely shows that there’s a lot of appeal to full-body gaming (though of course, the fact that the few arcades we have left have all pretty much been taken over by this sort of game is another clue).

There are challenges, though — actually moving about the world doesn’t map well yet. I’ve always wondered how it was that Picard and Geordi didn’t constantly bang their noses against the walls in the Holodeck. Typical living rooms are even smaller. So we end up with situations where you are moving around the world using videogame controls, while doing other ineractions with VR-style controls.

There’s several projects that I have kept an eye on to do things like all-direction treadmills. They are all still in early stages, and are oriented first at location-based entertainment and atmilitary training applications.

I’ve long wanted to do an MMO game that combined the EyeToy and a dance mat. Use the dance mat to drive around the world, and use a nerf sword you can swing to do your combat. With the Wii, I’d so it with the nunchuck instead.

you kick ass. seriously, I read your piece on racism in gaming and I was delighted. I’ve always felt that way, especially about the ‘dark’ races like the Drow and the goblins. I think the standard fantasy-game description of a Drow resembles the standard Victorian European imperialist description of a Negro, which is why I dislike both terms. Think about it: Dark Continent versus Underdark (or other huge, ‘evil’ cave system underground). Then you have the savagery, the ‘inherently immoral’ religion, and so forth.

I agree that a lot of unconscious and even conscious racism has crept in. Of course, the original versions of the Drow are drawn from the trow of Scandinavian myth. For all we know, their origins could have had elements of racism as well — it’s not like those ancient European cultures were all that worldly. A heck of a lot of Celtic myth seems to be based on the presence of cultures earlier than the Celts, for example; Picts evolved into pixies, and so on.

I used to refer to the generic fantasy novel as coming from “the evil-in-a-direction-of-your-choice” school. If evil came from the north, the mega-villain was an embodiment of winter; if it came from the south, it was dark and corrupt and sexual, likely involving snakes or spiders. If it came from the east, it was mysterious and… you get the idea.

To some degree, this sort of thing in our fantasy can be blamed not just on racism, but on the geography of the European continent. Europe is laid out such that anything beyond straits or mountain ranges or oceans is “very far away,” from a historical point of view. Whereas areas along the Silk Road were pretty cosmopolitan, engaging in commerce with nations from Thailand to Africa, Northern Europe was pretty isolated. Heck, during the Classical period, even the Mediterranean areas were pretty isolated from a lot, and so we got mermaids and unicorns from sea lions and rhinos.

Eventually, what with the massive conflicts with Islam, it wasn’t until much later that we started to see cultural exchange happening again. And then we got stuff like Orientalism, which was racist in its own way, though largely driven by ignorance… and eventually, stuff like the caricatures of the Chinese in particular, in the pulp era.

Anyway — to some large degree, a lot of fantasy is about the eruption of The Other into your nice peaceful land, wrecking everything. It’s sort of implicit in the genre. Arthur has his Saxons, and Roland his Moors; Celtic myth is full of battles between the older Tuatha de Danaan and the new arrivals. As many have observed, fantasy is fundamentally conservative, and even isolationist and Luddite. And this tends to translate into our game fictions, and thence even into our game mechanics.

Something to keep in mind as I am designing the next one, actually, which I have begun the process of — it’s tricky maintaining that interesting element of cultural conflict and group association for players, while providing a decent underlying social infrastructure so that you aren’t just creating “bad guys” for the sake of bad guys.

Raph: Long time lurker, first time e-mailer, SWG was my first MMO and I appreciate what you tried to accomplish for it. Since I’m comparatively new to MMOs, I don’t have the history behind many of the communities. [MMO forum] baffles me; the forum atmosphere seems toxic… And yet you and many other MMO developers pay a lot of attention to it. Why is [MMO forum] so important to you guys? Please paraphrase my question, as I don’t INTEND to start a flamewar, although publicly answering the question alone may be enough to start one. I would like to remain anonymous if you decide to tackle the subject on your blog.

Well, many of the MMO forums are toxic and cynical and bitter and jaded. And that’s paradoxically why we like them. A lot of the forums populated by the more optimistic folks are essentially forums populated by the newer folks. And while the optimism is great, newer folks don’t always call you on your bullshit, they don’t always know when you are overpromising, and they don’t always have a sense of what is possible. If you can win over the cynical jaded jerks, odds are that you have something that will be exciting to everyone.

But it can be exhausting dealing with all the shattered dreams and hopes all the time, and the accumulated skepticism. I think most all the developers who have been around for a while have been painted with somewhat stereotypical brush strokes in some of those communities, too. So there’s impressions to overcome which often don’t reflect what you really think you’re about.

Bottom line, though, is that if you only ever look into mirrors that make you look good, I’ll be a lot more worried about what you eventually produce. You need to be able to absorb the criticism and learn from it, and that’s why you see a lot of the devs seeking out the places where that criticism concentrates. I am a lot more worried about an upcoming MMO that only gets fanboi feedback, than I am about the one that gets scrutinized by the most jaded and cynical among us.

Raph, I discovered your site after reading the discussion printed in Harpers last year about video games and literacy. I am a 7th grade social studies teacher in New York whose ambition is to leave the classroom and work on “educational” video games. By “work on,” I mean develop in the research/design sense – not so much the programming (yet), because I don’t have any experience in that. As a teacher whose students all have a laptop in the classroom (in the South Bronx, no less), I’ve realized that I am losing a major opportunity in not being able to give them a more interactive experience. So my question: Do you have any thoughts about how I can pursue this? I’d be interested in working for anyone, in any capacity, who is interested in developing games for the classroom. I don’t know where to go, who’s doing this, and if it’s being done in New York. Thanks for your help – the Harpers conversation was what got me thinking about this. Christina

Oof — there’s actually an embarrassment of places that are trying to use games in the classroom. Since you are in New York, might I suggest connecting perhaps with the fabulous group over at NYU? Ken Perlin’s been working on creating a kid-friendly programming language, for example.

For more general use of games in education, I would suggest you track down the writings of Marc Prensky, who has been focusing on the use of games for training for years and years now. I’d suggest Jim Gee’s program up in Wisconsin as well, though his books are aimed at a more theoretical level… but I want to say that some of the other folks in the program there, like Constance Steinkuehler, have been doing work with kids in the age bracket you’re talking about.

Hi Raph, I’ve enjoyed both your blog and your posts on F13, especially your thoughts on non-Diku MMO systems. I’ve got a project in the early stages — the idea is a small-scale 2D MMO with no ‘advancement’ as we traditionally know it – no levels, no XP. I’ve whittled down my ideas for the systems and gameplay into a 2 page design doc. Would you be willing to take a glimpse at it, and tell me if you think it could end up being ‘fun’? Thanks

Bluntly, no. Sorry! 🙂 Post it on the web! This is just one representative email out of many that I get asking me to review game ideas and designs. Honestly, I don’t have the time to do that sort of thing. And you’ll probably find that players in general are just as good at poking holes in game designs as game designers are — often better.

Hello Mr.Koster, I’ve been a fan of yours for quite sometime now. Especially in the work you and your fellow visionaries did on Star Wars galaxies (1.0) (May it rest in piece). I’m in a time and place in my life that I want to begin to look towards making my own MMO (eventually) even though indie developers seem to have a hard time with just about everything surrounding such a project. I’ve read tons of books on MMO development, Game Development(general), and quite a few books on just how to make games of any sort fun and interesting. One thing that’s missing in all these books is how does a person approach a design doc for a game exactly, MMO in particular? Is there a set rule of how it should be done? Some secret Word template all you Devs pass around we the players never see? If there is no real rule/template/guideline for such a thing. Would you be willing to perhaps post some of your thoughts on your blog on doing design docs? While I’d love to get an email from you with that soopersekret Word template I think it would be a good blog post for some of us people who’ve winged game design in the past who are wanting to move towards MMOs. Because let’s face it, MMOs need every little thing thought out first or your in deep doo doo. Thanks for your time and any info you care to pass on to us. Have a good day Mr.Koster.

There’s no set rule, so I can just tell you how I do it at ths point. I do even have a Word template of sorts, or at least a typical outline.

First, I start out by having both a unifying mechanic or a vision of a setting/metaphor. It doesn’t much matter to me which end I start from. For example, Andean Bird started with a dream of an experience, the flapping, followed by trying to get the mechanic to match that metaphor. Other games I have done started with the mechanic first, and then it was a matter of hunting for the metaphor.

On a smaller game, I don’t even do much of a design doc. I’ll move right to prototype once I have those two pieces. But on larger games, there’s more moving parts, and therefore more of a process. And this is a sliding scale; for example, I did a board game called Edinburgh that involved lots of cards, a board, a bunch of types of tokens, and so on. It went from metaphor & mechanic to prototype to doc and then to more design work based on the doc.

So your question is about the doc. Here’s the broad outline:

• A paragraph or two that is effectively the sales pitch. This can be thought of as being the back of the box copy, or the flap on a hardcover book — it needs to be something that gets the overall point across. If you can’t provide the core of this in a sentence or two, you will have real trouble conveying what your game is about to anyone. For Edinburgh, it was a paragraph that basically said “This is a game of competitive urban planning,” which is more fun that it sounds. 🙂
• A set of design goals. This isn’t for the public, the way the above paragraph is. It’s for you. I got this trick from Alan Pavlish, of Wasteland fame. Basically, it’s a set of one-sentence bullet points that you can come back to throughout the process to check that you are making what you set out to make. You can feel free to let these evolve, but it’s a useful mechanism for checking what you are doing. For Edinburgh, the goal was to marry a card game with a territory game.
• A critical part of this is identifying “what this game is about.” You need to know this for both the mechanic and for the metaphor, because these are what the game is going to be teaching. In the case of Edinburgh, it was the idea of how towns get to their unique layouts (Edinburgh has an amazing downtown that was the result of an architectural competition a century or two ago). And for the mechanic, it was about grouping cards, really — a set-building exercise.
• A list of the core mechanics, each with a paragraph description. Don’t go overboard. You just want to know how the mechanic works. The idea is to be able to see all the moving parts.
• A description of the metaphor — meaning, the art style, narrative, etc. In a large project, this may mean a bunch of concept art. It could include a whole bunch of lore and fiction — or not.

That forms what I call “a vision doc.” It’s often preceded by a one pager that is a stripped down version of even that, which is sometimes called the pitch doc, but if you’re doing this for yourself, you don’t need that. The order of the pieces in a vision doc is fluid — it’s about conveying the overall game to someone else. You’ll notice it is light on details.

After that, there’s two approaches. One is the design bible. I have come to hate this approach. This is where you take each of the paragraphs and turn it into a full-fledged design document, which includes in it all of the above, only in great detail. So for each system, you have its pitch paragraph, its goals, its destailed mechanics description, its art asset list, and so on. The problem with this approach is that you end up with 700 page documents (or Wikis) that can be very hard to update, and tend to fall out of date or grow rigid.

I now prefer a more bullet-item sort of approach. If you can’t describe the mechanics in a bullet point list, it’s probably too complicated anyway. And bullets are a lot like a code outline — there’s clear cause-and-effect. All games work on mathematical principles, so being able to describe your system in a very logical flow helps a ton when it comes to implementation — even in board games.

Depending on who the audience is for this bulleted doc, you may or may not need all of the other stuff — the lore, the justifications, etc. The portion of the vision stuff can be helpful for keeping a large team on track — but only if they actually pay attention to it. The art asset list can be really helpful — unless it’s a small team, and easier to keep one centralized list rather than disperse it into many docs. You get the idea — use the organizational system that works for you. It’ll likely vary project to project.

One piece that I strongly suggest either way is a section on the designer’s best guess as to how to min-max the system, strategy tips, etc. This is also effectively a crude testing plan. And that’s because the most critical element in the design process is to test, test, test. Playtest early and often. Watch silently as others play what you have done, and take notes. And abandon your ego.