No Time To Play

Playing cards are popular both in the real world and on the computer. In the former case, because the components are cheap and compact (at least when stored), and the games themselves can often be played in confined spaces, such as on the train. In the latter case, because they require only static pictures for art, and little computing power.

I suspect everybody knows at least a few of the several hundred games you can play with a standard 52-card deck. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Magic: The Gathering — a single game — has thousands of cards and counting. It is also a considerable money investment. But what lays between these extremes, and how do tabletop card cames inform their computer counterparts?

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Buzz Grid running on MicroEmulator

Last time I announced taking a break from programming. And I have… for about a weekend. During which time I caused a pretty sweet raytraced scene reminiscent of a 1990-something adventure game. Reading a book about Myst the weekend before must have something to do with it.

Then, of course, my mood to program came back. Or maybe it was the vitamin supplement I’ve been taking. Fact is, less than a week later I can play Buzz Grid on my Nokia E51. And boy, that makes me happy.

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Logo from Wikipedia

Good Old Games (GOG.com) has released the first and second trilogies of the Ultima series.  This is significant because for many people, Ultima was their first delve into computer RPG’s.  Not only that, but the Ultimas for better or worse have shaped all the RPGs that have followed it.

Some things that are staples today in what is considered an “expansive world” (like the ability to cook, or NPC schedules) started or at least became popular in the Ultima games.  And Richard “Lord British” Garriott, creator of Ultima, is a model for many developers who would like to strike it big in the world of game development starting from nothing but lines of code and a PC.

So, whatever your opinion of Ultima, it has a lot of historical significance.  And so I bought the two trilogies on GOG.com and started playing through them.  This article is going through the ones I have played, comparing my recollections of the games with my actual playthroughs and noting things that are interesting in each title.

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Gamebooks were developed roughly in parallel with text adventures, and became fairly popular during the 1980es and 1990es; I remember reading quite a few of them before getting my first computer. (I would have continued, but lost access to my source.)

One would have expected the genre to migrate naturally to computers and especially the Web. But when I got on the Internet, there was little to be found apart from whimsical, quickly abandoned addventures and the high-brow experimental stuff typically promoted by the Electronic Literature Organization. And then there was the modern interactive fiction community, which I discovered around 2004. But the IF community had little love lost for the genre.

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After my last rant, several friends expressed interest in helping me create a browser-based MMORPG. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I pointed out repeatedly on this blog, any gamer naturally dreams of creating their own MMO some day. Now, if you’re going to make one of these, a browser-based game is the easiest option by far. Especially if you’re an experienced Web developer, and we are.

The question is, what game to make? The possibilities are endless… but so is the array of competing titles. To navigate the chaos, let’s look at some of the existing options. What do they have in common? What works? What doesn’t? What do they lack?

These are my answers. Yours will likely be different.

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen;

Felix has been kind enough to give me permission to make a mess of post on this site, so in the proud tradition of programmers everywhere: Hello, world!

Let me warn you; the first part of this is going to read a little bit like a rant, but I promise it gets constructive.  And I’m not ranting against things I hate, I’m ranting about things I wish could be better.  Things, in fact, that I love.  To my mind, this is vital for game developers to see; we, as a collective, need to always learn and strive to make better products.  We need to learn from the good and from the bad, and always play with an open mind.

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I liked roguelikes ever since I discovered the genre, possibly in 2002 or 2003 — around the same time I stumbled into the modern IF community. But while my involvement with the latter was significant, the former remained a marginal interest at best, despite attempts to change that.

Wait, what are roguelikes? For younger gamers, they are the ancestors of Diablo, although that might seem hard to believe when you see the latter next to, say, Nethack. Connoisseurs will tell you it’s one of the oldest computer game genres, along with text adventures, and with the same timeless appeal due to the use of text as a medium.

They can also be some of the most frustrating computer games out there.

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Let me tell you about the man named Chris Crawford. A legendary game designer, he created several landmark war- and strategy games, and most importantly wrote a good deal about it. His 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design (available for free online) is pretty much required reading in this business. For at least 15 years, he’s been working on a system for interactive storytelling called Storytron — formerly Erasmatron — which he hopes will revolutionize gaming.

After reading my recent article about games and stories, a friend pointed out that my ideas sound a lot like the concept that underlies Storytron. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my point at all, and whether the misunderstanding was my fault or his, a clarification can only help.

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Remember this article from three months ago, which decried the treatment classic game franchises get nowadays? Turns out, the feeling is shared. Which isn’t exactly surprising, and maybe I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, but for the remarks I made in my previous article.

See, the fact that many modern games (and movies) have terrible stories can be forgiven. It’s a matter of fashion, and fashions go as easily as they come. But when you make a sequel of a cult classic from decades ago, turning it into a brainless GFX-fest — as is the current trend — simply can’t go unnoticed.

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So, I spent much of last week preparing and then running an RPG session. Normally, I suck at making up stories (believe me, I tried for years). But as a game master, I’m actually adequate, or so my players tell me. Which used to puzzle me: if static, linear storytelling is hard, interactive storytelling should be much harder, right?

It took me a long time to understand that it’s the other way around. With the imagination of other people helping you, it should be much easier (for reasons I will explain in a moment). But this conclusion raises another question: if that’s the case, why do videogames, as a rule, have such sucky stories that some people question whether they should try for stories at all?

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