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.

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.

With only a few days before the release of ME2 I finally buckled down and decided to finish the first game since I had barely made a dent in it since I had picked it up. This caused me to finish the game the day of the release of ME2, so I finished ME1 then went straight into ME2. Which looking back on it now was maybe the best thing that could have happened.

Going right from ME1 to ME2 like that proved to be a really great experience, since you are playing with your same character from ME1 and it picks up right at the end of the last game so it almost felt like I wasn’t so much starting a new game as I was continuing onto the second disc of an epic game (I guess you’ll only get that reference if you played some of the long ass RPGs from the PS1 days when games like Final Fantasy VII came on 3 discs; I think FFIX came on 4.)

It’s also a testament to how well designed this series is. While ME2 does have better visuals then the original, everything still felt familiar, and looked consistent with ME1. It’s a great game, and I think that anyone who hasn’t played or finished ME1 should probably go and play that first, because you’re experience in ME2 will be all the better for it.

<Possible ME1&2 spoilers ahead?>

My one possible complaint with the game, although I’m not sure if it is, is that the ending doesn’t seem as fulfilling as it does in the first game. But as I noted I’m not sure its a problem with the game, but perhaps more a problem with Act 2′s.

See with ME1 it’s basically the first act of a larger trilogy long story. As such it’s more about introducing the player to the world of ME, as well as introducing the the overarching story. It did this through your pursuit of Saren and his goal of finding the conduit so that he can call the Reapers back to the galaxy. Thus the crux of the story is chasing after Saren to stop him, which serves as a very understandable goal.

ME2 though is Act 2 of this trilogy, so although it delves deeper into the world of ME, it also has to serve as a vehicle for mainly moving the overarching story of the games. Although the story feels somewhat less focused then in ME1 where you were set about stopping this one person who you could understand the motivations of, while in ME2 you are trying to stop the Collectors who you don’t really understand at all.

But even though you are trying to stop them, the missions you go on are generally not in pursuit of them. They are typically about building up your team so that you can fight them and win. Then when you do pursue them, or go to fight them, it’s generally on someone else’s terms and not your own. You generally seem to only have control over how you go about constructing you team.

As I was saying I’m not sure that this is so much the fault of the game, but more about where it falls in the overarching story, since they need to start setting the stage for the final battle while also trying to tell you an interesting story. So regardless of what you do I think that it no matter how you try and end an Act 2 game like this, you are going to end up leaving a lot open and leaving it feeling like you are just setting up Act 3 (the last game,) because that is what you have to do.

</Possible spoilers>

I have one more things I want to talk about in regards to Mass Effect, but I think I’ll save that for a separate entry, as I think this one is long enough, and that it can stand on its own.

Games of the Year List:

• inFamous
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
• Flower
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Assassin’s Creed 2

Best Game of the Year:

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

I signed it after reading this editorial by the editor of PC Gamer magazine.

Although I can understand to an extent why they are doing this (helps to prevent piracy, more ad money from ads on their servers, etc.) it seems to me that they don’t really understand the point of dedicated servers in the long run. Now I wrote a whole thing a few months back for a class about how a dedicated server can become an important social space online (you can read it here.) But basically what I said was that they can become meeting spaces, places for people to gather, because you begin to connections with the people that frequent the server, as you yourself frequent it more and more.

That sort of thing doesn’t occur in match making games, where the odds are pretty low that you are going to play with someone over and over, unless they are a friend and you specifically work that out.

Add in that there won’t be including mod tools, either for modding servers (since their aren’t any dedicated ones,) as well as none for actual game modification. The second I think is a pretty big blow, because when you look at what the modding community does not just in what they are able to produce, but also that these modders often times then go on to build real games in those game engines they are familiar with from doing the modding. This is where Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection, and many other games came from.

The removal of dedicated servers from the PC version has certainly caused me to question a possible purchase of the game. Not of just the PC version, but the game in general. Right now the only way I see getting it is for the Xbox 360, and getting it used, so that I’m not giving them money for the game. It seems a bit harsh to do it that way, but its the only way it seems to show them my displeasure at their choice.

Valve, first off I love your work. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (at launch,) all amazing games which I have spent more time then I want to think about playing, but every moment was great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Which is what brings me here today, having this intervention for you, you need to realize Valve that you are hurting Team Fortress 2. I know you guys love it as much as I do, and you think you are doing the right thing, that’s it’s, “for its own good,” and that you “are just making it better.” But you guys need to take a step back an really think about what you are doing.

I’m speaking specifically about the new weapon procurement system you’ve added to the game, and I can understand why you would want to put in such a system. It prevents everyone on the night of new updates from playing that single class for the next few days, knocking the balance of the game off for those days. And perhaps more importantly it makes it easier for more casual TF2 players, and new players to pick up the game and get rewarded with these weapons just for spending time playing.

You need to reward players for their time playing, but you need to reward them for trying new classes, or becoming more skillful at the game. The best solution for this seems to be to do something like Call of Duty’s leveling system, where players receive experience for kills, completing map objectives, and whatnot. That experience then goes towards unlocking levels, and by leveling players are able to access new weapons, and abilities. 

By which I mean that as consumers we have the right to resell books, movies, CDs, video games, and the like that we had bought previously. It’s a surprisingly important, and little known right that everyone in the US has (outside the US I’m pretty sure it’s not always the case.)

Even so there is something of a unique problem (of sorts) with the video game after market that doesn’t exist for any other kind of media. Now when you are looking to sell a used book you go to a used book store, maybe a pawn shop, eBay, or maybe you sell it at a yard sale. Same goes for music or movies, you would go to a used music store, or used movie store, pawn shop, eBay, yard sale, etc. With these forms of media there exist stores specifically designed to buy back your books, or music, or movies, and sell only these used ones. You don’t see a Tower Records store selling used CDs, or a Barnes & Noble selling used books. Yet for video games we have a big retailer in GameStop that not only sells new games, but used as well.

I’m not saying it’s something they shouldn’t be doing, but rather it was a rather ingenious business plan. The problem with this though from the stand point of the industry is that GameStop looks to sell you used before new, and when people are not buying new games they are not able to accurately count what games sell, but it also takes money out of their pockets when you make it so easy for consumers to purchase a cheaper used version over a new more expensive copy.

But the industry can’t do anything about it really, because they don’t hold enough power over GameStop to make them stop selling used games. And of course GameStop has no real reason to stop doing something that is so profitable for them.

So what’s the solution to this? Well the solution has to do a few things: 1) it has to allow GameStop (or any other secondary market retailer) to continue to sell used games, 2) it has to give the games industry some money for the used games that are sold, 3) it has to not violate consumers’ right of first sale. This seems to be like a pretty tricky set of guidelines to slip a solution into, but I think I have determined something that does.

Basically it is this, the industry writes up an agreement with GameStop and other used game sellers that give the industry a cut every time a used game is sold (some percentage of the sale price.) In order to get these stores to agree to this the industry agrees to sell games to these stores at a discounted cost, so that the new retail copy of a game would drop from $60 to $50.

So why would this deal work? Well the game industry gets what it wants, and starts to pull in some money off these used sales, but in doing so it also is good for the consumer because it will give them better metrics for tracking these sales. Which means that games that maybe did poorly new, but do much better as used titles might see sequels or their development teams might see more financing for other projects. The benefit to GameStop for this concession is that the lower cost of new games at their stores means that they are likely to pull consumers away from their other competitors that are forced to charge the higher price for the games. This is of course a boon to consumers (especially in the tough economic times we have now,) by making gaming a cheaper cost. And the game’s industry should be able to make up what money they lose on selling the games at a cheaper cost, through the money they get from the percentage they get from the used games sales.

Also the prices of used games should stay generally about the same as they are now since there would be a slight increase in their cost due to the industry taking a percent, but then because the cost of the new copy is also decreased the cost of the used should as decrease and cancel out the rise in cost from the industry’s percent.