Game grammar in action: AOC’s DPS bug

 Posted by (Visited 13619 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 032008
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The market glut

 Posted by (Visited 19189 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
May 202008
 

Nielsen is saying that Club Penguin is stalling out — not much, just a -7% growth year on year from last April to this April.

Of course, with the quantity of kids’ worlds coming into the market now, this is not really surprising, is it? I mean, I was at the grocery store this weekend, and there was a rack of Beanie Babies 2.0 with giant “play online!” tags hanging on them. It may be that this is the death of “Web 2.0,” when it gets co-opted for Beanie Babies.

At left here is the rack of game cards available at Target — snapped this weekend, and strongly reminiscent, finally, of similar shots I have taken in Korea, Japan, and China. For years, there was no such rack in the US. Then it was just a couple of cards, and only at some checkouts. Now it gets a rack right between the TV box sets and the top pop albums (you can see REM’s latest CD there, abandoned on the top shelf).

Besides the cards you maybe expect to see, like Club Penguin, WoW, and Zwinky, there’s also a large stack of ’em for gPotato games (Flyff, Shot Online, etc) And Acclaim, which make their living by bringing over games from Korea. There’s WildTangent cards, and the Gaia cards are almost sold out. The diversity is interesting, as is the lack of cards for most of the core gamer MMORPGs. The strong presence of the often-marginalized Korean games is telling.

Meanwhile, I hear that Age of Conan has something like 700,000 units in the pipe for day one, which is either a business blunder or a sign of high pre-orders and pent-up demand. WoW players looking for something new to sink their teeth into?

We’re starting to see the fragmentation that can come from having so many offerings on the market. How many kids’ worlds can actually survive?

I actually think the answer is “just about all of them.” If online continues to chew through the gaming market, this rack could be the size of a Gamestop someday — one stack of cards per game, in a world where all the games try to drive alternate revenue streams regardless of platform.