As Liszkiewicz says in his article, what gets people to play is social obligation. People get pulled into playing by their real life friends that are already playing. FarmVille requires you to have more neighbors, or friends, connected to your farm in order to open up access to more items and crops. This incentivizes you as the player to get your friends to play the game, and they join because as a friend they wish to help you in playing the game. They then turn around and do the same thing with their friends, ad infinitum.

This social obligation also can keep them playing once they start due to the gifting system in FarmVille, where neighbors are able to send each other gifts that can give them new animals, or objects for their farms. Again this plays on people wanting to help their friends by sending them things that will help them with their farm, and by playing and leveling their farm player’s gain access to better gifts that they are able to give.

Now because of the popularity of the game there is also a social currency aspect involved as well. By which I mean people use their familiarity in playing the game in social situations, such as over hearing people talking about FarmVille and then using that to introduce oneself or showing off the rare new object you found on your farm to your other FarmVille friends. The latter is one of the things that helps drive people to spend money on the game, since most of the items in the game (especially the cool looking or limited edition ones,) can only be acquired by spending real money.

This third reason for why they play is related to gratification, both in the short term and the long term. What I mean is that the game is built around you feeling gratification for what you are doing, whether it’s leveling up, or earning a ribbon (their form of achievements,) or mastering a crop. It’s all about making you feel rewarded you for playing.

Initially when starting you receive a lot of short term gratification in the form of levels, and ribbons. Which comes rather quick and easy, but as you play more and more there are fewer and fewer short term gratifications and more and more long term ones. For instance with the ribbons they have four levels to them. The first level for one is to harvest ten crops, the next level is 1,000, then 5,000, then 25,000.

It is set up this way to interest players during the early portion of the game, while they are figuring things out they feel as though they are achieving a lot. But then as the game progresses it goes away, because when you have constant gratification like that it can get old and stale. While long term gratifications mean that you have been working on something for a while in order to achieve it, and in doing so you get more of a feeling of accomplishment then you would with a shorter term one since it was something you had to do more work for.

Overall it’s a very narrow and shallow game experience, so much so I’ve debated calling it a toy instead of a game. This isn’t to say that there isn’t enjoyment to be had with it, but that there isn’t much in the way of thinking involved in the game. The most thinking involved seems to be determining which crop will have the greatest experience and money yield for the amount of time it takes to grow. If the game had more depth to it, and required more critical thinking , it could be a more enjoyable experience. This, in turn, could attract people to play it with an interesting experience rather than preying on a person’s real world relationships for players.

This seemingly creates an issue in the storytelling, which is that the players’ John Marston may in fact be very different from the John Marston of the cut-scenes. This issue is seemingly caused by the objective and subjective storytelling aspects of the game. Where you have the objective storytelling of the cut-scenes and scripted moments, where the player is not in control of Marston. And then the subjective storytelling moments which is basically ever other moment in the game where the player is in complete control over Marston’s actions.

But this issue doesn’t seem to actually occur, because while the player is seemingly given carte blanche over the game world while they playing the game between those scripted moments, they actually aren’t. In fact they are actually rather limited in what they can do, especially when you compare it to the Grand Theft Auto games (post GTA3.) Specifically on one detail, prostitutes.

In the past GTA games one was able to have sex with prostitutes, which was one way to rejuvenate the character’s health. But in Red Dead Redemption, while there seems to be no shortage of prostitutes, it is impossible to procure their services in any way. While it could have been done simply to avoid the unpleasantness that sort of thing brought to the GTA series from people looking to blame society’s ills on video games, I think that rather this was done as a conscious storytelling decision.

John Marston is a married man, one incredibly devoted to his wife. So much so that he goes around hunting his old friends to make sure she is safe. If he weren’t so devoted he would have no reason to be doing the things he is doing. Thus if the player were allowed to have him cheat on his wife, it completely ruins his motivation for what he’s doing in the first place. Thus it is removed as a choice for the player, because it is impossible for Marston as a character to do it.

This is in line with Anthony Burch’s “suspension of agency” idea that a player is willing to give up some control/choice in order to have better immersion in the game. This is arguably what they are doing by taking away that option. By removing it they are making the player more in line with Marston then having the player make Marston like themselves, but by doing so they make the player more invested/empathetic to him and thus more immersed and engaged with the game.

Now I would argue that John Marston in the game is supposed to be a good guy, by that I mean he doesn’t go around shooting everyone, robbing banks, stealing horses, etc. Well perhaps not a “good guy,” but a reformed bad guy. One wanting to leave that life behind him, and not wanting to do the bad things he did when he was younger. Which is why I think that the choices there for the player to do bad things is not about giving the player a choice between a good John Marston and a bad John Marston, but rather a John Marston who wants to be good but can easily lapse back into doing bad things. The bad choices, (the things that give you dishonor,) are there to taunt Marston to coax him back into his old outlaw/bandit way of doing things, and thus are also there to tempt the player as well.

The “morality system” supports this by being made up of honor and dishonor, and not some version good or bad. The reason this is different from saying he is good or bad is because in order to gain or lose honor one first has to have set morality to judge actions as being honorable, or dishonorable from. In the game the actions that give him honor are good deeds, rescuing people, not killing a criminal when you can capture them alive, etc. While the actions that bring dishonor are stealing horses, money, killing innocents, killing your own horse, etc.

Based on what constitutes honor and dishonor, we can deduce that Marston is neither a good or bad person, although aspiring to be good (which is supported by some of the scripted moments.) This is because if he were a bad person, then the actions of killing and stealing would possibly be considered honorable, with the good deeds might be seen as dishonorable.

What this all means is somehow this team at Rockstar has managed to tell an objective story (one without any branching or multiple endings,) while still giving the player the feeling of agency (that they can do whatever they want in the world and aren’t unnaturally restricted.) Without making any of their choices inconsistent with the character and story they are trying to tell, while also immersing the player into the role of John Marston.  This is by no means a small feat, especially in an open world/sandbox game.

Unfortunately I don’t really have the money to pay her, and that’s where you can come in. In order to cover the costs of the art I’ve setup a project over at Kickstarter. The deal with that is you can pledge money to my project, and if I meet or exceed my goal then I get the money. Otherwise I get nothing.  It’s an all or nothing system.

So what is in it for you? Well depending on how much you pledge you can get different rewards like: access to an early beta version of the game, an appearance in the comic, access to a private development blog, or a special limited hardcover book edition of the comic. Other cool stuff like that.

There is also some more information about the project on the Kickstarter page. You probably won’t see many updates here on this blog about the project, I think most of those are going to be put up in the private Kickstarter development blog, although I will probably still post about some of the bigger milestone stuff here as well.

So if you are interested in helping me out some by pledging a donation, you can check out the Kickstarter page here.

So what my project is is a videogame, and also a comic book. Or a comic book and also a videogame, depending on how you look at it I guess. The best way I’ve found to describe it is as a comic book point-and-click adventure game. It’s called Quest to Nowhere: Summer Days.

Quest to Nowhere, aside from being the name of this blog/website, was originally a webcomic I wrote. I really like the characters, and the name, and have always been sort of working on it in the back of my mind. So this project gave me a chance to revisit that, and play around with those characters again.

The game itself, as I have it planned right now, will be like reading a comic book. But you are only given so much of it, and you have to solve puzzles by interacting with the comic itself in order to open up more pages, thus advancing the story.

That’s sort of the quick and dirty explanation of it. I’m going to be doing everything for it (writing, programming, etc.) except for the art for the comic which I am hiring someone to do. To help pay for that I’m going to setup a donations thing with rewards for people that donate, but more on that later in the week probably once I have it up and running.

Essentially it comes down to two things: flow and balance. While both are important for multiplayer level design, each if specifically more important for one type of multiplayer. Basically flow is important for deathmatch/free-for-all game types, while balance is the important factor for team based game types.

Flow, or what I mean by it in terms of level design, is the way players travel through a level, but also it’s about controlling the areas where players will battle. Having good flow in a level is helps keep the players from getting lost, but also helps direct them towards their objective. Which in deathmatch games is to kill the other players, so it’s about directing them into places where they can have battles. These areas are typically more open than other rooms, and are designed for clusters of players to battle without it feeling too chaotic.

For good examples of flow in a free-for-all style map I would look at some of the Unreal Tournament 2004 maps, as well as the Quake 3 maps. These maps generally did the best job in regards to flow, because the levels were constructed basically as mazes that wrapped back in on themselves. This made it so that players, even if they got lost, would eventually find themselves moving from the smaller hallways of the level into the more open areas where much of the fighting took place. Additional those hallways served as places for players to escape to to restock weapons and health, but the more powerful weapons and power ups are placed in the open areas to draw players into those spaces.

Balance is a little easier to explain, level balance for a team based game is so that the level is constructed in such a way as to not give either team an advantage. Most of the time, in order to balance the game for the teams, the level itself has to be designed to favor one team over the other in order for the game to work as intended. For instance in a capture the flag type game where there is only one flag, one team might be designated to protect it and lose if the other team manages to capture it. In this case the map would need to be balanced to give the defending team an advantage in order to make it challenging for the other team to win, but not too advantageous that it is too difficult for the attacker.

The best examples of balance come from the maps in Team Fortress 2, specifically Dustbowl for asymmetric balance and Badlands for symmetric balance. With symmetric maps the balance is a bit easier then the asymmetric stuff, since the map is the same on both sides. So whatever one team has the other team has, whether that is a weakness or a strength in how the map is designed.

However there is a bit more to it then just giving each side the same level layout. The way Badlands (control point gametype,) is designed is so that most of the battling occurs around the central map point (as you can see in the heat map of the level below, which shows the places where players die frequently.) It does this by making the second control point (which is the next point a team has to capture after the center point,) very difficult to defend as an attacker. So once it is taken by the attacker they need to move quickly to the last point before they lose it.

TF2 heat map of CP_Badlands

It is also not easy for the defending team to protect it either, at least not directly. Because the point is on a spire of sorts, it is higher up then any other part of the map that the player can get to. So even protecting it you can only shoot up at it. There also is not much room around the point itself, which makes it hard to set up a defense on the point, especially with sentry guns. Which makes it so that the defender is pushed to defend by stopping the attacker before they reach the point, and it laid out the map in such a way as to give them the ability to do so by making the area around this point very open. But they also provided the attackers with a more round about route to the second point which could allow the attackers to thwart the defense by flanking it.

Additionally the final point itself is even more advantageous to defend. Although there are a number of avenues for the attacking team to enter the room from, all of them are easily defendable with a few sentry guns. Now the need to give the defender such an advantage at this control point, and the previous one, is that the defender needs to be able to more then just defend they also need to attack. So by giving them an advantage in defending the expectation is that this will allow a few of the players to go on the offensive to try and take the attacker’s point so that they can maybe shift the momentum of the match.

Now with asymmetric maps like TF2′s Dustbowl (control point gametype,) one team is always on defense and the other is always on offense. Generally though asymmetric is a lot like a symmetric map once someone has taken the middle point, although there are some differences that need to be accounted for.

For instance the defending team doesn’t need to go on the attack at all, so having something like Badlands’ second point would be a poor choice for an asymmetric map since it was designed to have a lot of back and forth fighting over. Which is not something you have at all in an attack/defend map since once a point is taken in this mode it can’t be taken back. For that point to work in this type of game mode then it would need to be changed to allow the defender to actually defend the point directly, rather then be forced to defend in indirectly as I mentioned earlier.

TF2 heat map of CP_Dustbowl

So while there needs to be an advantage for the defender here, there also needs to be an advantage for the attacker. The attacker advantage is to give them a number of ways to get at the control point, but also to give them a place where they can set up to assault the next point. This area for a fire base is needed since the respawn area for Dustbowl doesn’t move during the round for the attacker. It also allows the defending team to have a more active defense that goes out to deal with these bases, rather then simply sitting and waiting for the attackers to make their move. This however is more about player psychology then level design.

Now while I’m specifically highlighting balance and flow as two major aspects that should be the concern of a level designer for a multiplayer FPS game, they are obviously not the only ones. Especially in regards to the type of game mode the map is intended for, or what unique gameplay qualities one game has over another. While those levels I mentioned before work in TF2, they probably wouldn’t if they were ported to a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, or Battlefield: Bad Company 2, because of the gameplay mechanics involved in those games.

And as I said across different game types even within the same game require different considerations. For instance in TF2 there is a map called Well which started as a control point map, not unlike Badlands, but then they created a capture the flag version of this map. The CTF version has been altered a good deal, taking a rather large chunk of the map away, and replacing it with some new terrain, because that area in the CP game was the central point and was a good place to setup a firebase or for one team to defend from. Which in a CTF game would quickly cause a map to fall out of balance since it would make it difficult not only to get through to get to the flag, but also for the player to travel back through to bring the flag to their base. While also making it easier for the other team to take the flag since most of the map would essentially be in their control.

So to wrap this up; flow is the most important aspect of level design for free-for-all deathmatch style games, since its about drawing the players into specific areas of the level where they can have interesting battles. Yet also provide them with ways to escape or regroup if they need to get away from a player or players. While balance is the most important aspect of team based games, because you want to make things as even between the teams as possible, such that the only factor in deciding which team wins a match is based on their skill, tactics and strategy.

Basically subjective storytelling is a game story where the player is the character, which is what you see in games like Dragon Age: Origins. In these games the players get to create the character, and they are in control of the actions and decisions of the character during the game.

While objective storytelling in a game is when the player is not the character. This is something like the Uncharted games, where the player is in control of Nathan Drake, but the player can’t really affect what Nathan does in terms of the story.

Now this whole objective versus subjective storytelling thing came up in the lecture, because (to paraphrase Mr. Troisi,) the reason why in Mass Effect you get only snippets of text to describe what Shepard is going to do/say, as opposed to the complete text of what the character is going to say like what you find in their other games like Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic or Jade Empire is that the Mass Effect games are objective games. While their past games have been subjective games.

Hearing that certainly helped clear up a lot of the design choices that they made in regards to the dialogue system works, how Shepard progresses as a character, as well as why the Paragon/Renegade system is the way it is. It basically comes down to them saying that the player isn’t Commander Shepard, but rather the player’s control over Shepard and her actions is more akin to like someone steering a raft in a quick moving river. While you might have some control over where your raft goes in the river, to dodge rocks and other obstacles in the path, the river is really more or less in control of where you are going.

Shepard is always going to try and save the galaxy from the Reapers, regardless of what the player wants. What the player gets to do is decide if she’s a “renegade” or a “paragon” while she does it.

So while I can see why they say it’s objective, I think that most people (based on people I’ve talked to about this and my own experience,) would probably say that Mass Effect 1 and 2 are subjective. This is because as the player we get to create Shepard. We choose what he or she looks like, if Shepard is male or female, what class they are, and we are given some options to choose a backstory for them as well. This along with the dialogue options in the game in essence give the illusion of a subjective storytelling experience.

This is why I think that player’s are able to get so immersed in the Mass Effect games, but is also why when we read one of the snippet dialogue options, and what it says isn’t actually what Shepard does it breaks the immersion big time for the player. Anthony Burch called this the “suspension of agency,” where as they player you are willing to give up some of the control you want in order to be given better immersion in the game world. Which the Mass Effect games do really really well.

I have to assume that the Mass Effect designers know what they are doing, and that they are walking this fine line between subjective and objective with player’s identifying/seeing themselves as Shepard, but not being in as much control over her as they would be with their Dragon Age character. Which kind of makes me both in awe of what they’ve done for two games, and also makes me really look forward to seeing what they do for Mass Effect 3.

Regardless I think that’s it something that some game designers and writers can learn from, that it’s possible to have both subjective and objective storytelling in a game (sort of.) And that a good mix of the two could produce a cocktail that manages to be more immersive then either alone.

I played some games, like the new Behemoth game (whose name escapes me right now,) also tried out Splinter Cell Conviction’s co-op mode, and played some of Split Second. I would have played some APB if I wasn’t already on the beta (but I think that’s all I can say about that right now.) The Behemoth game is looking like its going to be a lot of fun, Splinter Cell was about what I expected, and Split Second seemed cool but I think it’s not going to be enjoyable in terms of multiplayer.

But anyway, it was just a blast. The atmosphere of the whole thing was unlike any con I’ve been to. I think a lot of that was thanks to Wil Wheaton’s keynote, which really set the tone for everything.

I also managed to somehow not get sick at either GDC or PAX even though I was shaking a lot of hands. Not sure how that happened, but I’m happy it did. Well aside from feeling “homesick.”

I might be at the Halolz meetup, depending on what else is going on at that time/if I’m hungry since its supposed to be at the food court at noon on Saturday.

I only got to play a few games while I was there, since I spent most of my time at panels or trying to find a job/network. But from what I played I think that Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine was probably my favorite. It’s a top-down co-op stealth game, where you and up to three other people try to complete a robbery mission. However each player gets to pick the class they are, and each of course has its strengths. It’s rather frantic, but really fun. I’m looking forward to playing it with other people once its released.

Monaco was apart of the IGF (independent game festival,) as were Super Meat Boy, Shank, and the Devil’s Tuning Fork which I also got to play. Super Meat Boy is looking good, it’s basically the same as the flash version except with better graphics and additional characters, and some cool retro style levels.

Shank plays like a classic beat’um up game like Double Dragon, except it has a rather deep combo system to it. I managed to pick up the system pretty quickly, and I think I impressed the guy giving the demo. Regradless the animations are really the selling point of the game, it looks great, and was happy to hear that EA is going to be publishing it. Which is pretty cool.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is from some DePaul University students. It’s basically a first person puzzle game where you use sound to determine the look of the level, but also to solve some puzzles. It kind of reminds me of Unfinished Swan (which I played at last year’s GDC.) It’s a cool concept, and I should probably download it at some point to play through the whole thing (since I didn’t get to go through it all at the conference,) before I talk more about it.

Outside of the IGF I played some Tera, which is a new MMORPG. It’s got great graphics, and is trying to make a more action based MMO. For instance you only hit something if your weapon touches them. I plan to keep an eye on it, but didn’t really do much in the demo but run around and kill things to see how the more action based combat system worked.

Also tried out ModNation Racers for the PS3. It seems like it could be a really fun kart racing game to play with friends, especially since there is the whole track creation system. My only complaint was that the kart’s steering doesn’t seem as tight as it should be. It seemed to understeer a lot, but hopefully that is fixable in the options menu (I didn’t actually look.)

That’s probably enough GDC talk for now. I got a ton of ideas, and learned a bunch from the talks I went to. I can’t wait until next year, or at least GDC Austin.