Physics

From my point of view, rules define the world, and they’re unbreakable. My understanding doesn’t allow you to imagine a world with no rules, because it doesn’t exist: it can’t be defined. A world where the rules of physics don’t exist cannot support life… and neither matter nor energy.

When you explain any gameplay, you’re basically describing a set of rules. In Tetris, blocks of different shapes, falling down and gathering on the bottom of the screen, must be arranged in rows for the blocks in those rows to disappear. That description is nothing but a collection of rules: blocks exists, blocks have different shapes, blocks fall, falling things go down, things stop falling when they hit the bottom, a full row disappears.

In more advanced computer games, it’s the very same except with more complex systems. At the end of the day, any rules of a game played on a computer must have rules written in code, which means that they’re explicitly defined somewhere.

Enumerating all rules

I’ve been focusing on defining reality, or a computer simulation of reality, so far in my explanation of how I began to understand the concept of rules in a game context. However, my explanation is lacking if you move a step forward and consider a game with rules not explicitly and completely defined mathematically. An example we had in class was Chess. It was interesting to see how implied the rules are in many games, chess included. The example we were provided with was a player taking an infinite amount of time to make a move. To be honest, I’d like to see some more examples, since everything I could come up with was the same idea: blocking a game by refusing to do something. If anyone has any ideas, please comment. The point that was made in class was that it’s impossible to enumerate every rule for a game. In the example of taking forever to make a move, then a new rule must be made to enforce this. This process is supposed to be cyclic and result in an infinitely long list of rules. Again, if anyone has any examples to the contrary, please provide them.

So what sort of rules can be made to enforce desired behaviour, such as not taking forever to make a move?

Rules as an enforcement of social authority

One understanding that lots of people jumped to was rules in the context of a university or civil laws. These rules are made by people to define what other people can and cannot do. These are not really enforceable (if they were, there wouldn’t even need to be a word for “crime”, as it logically couldn’t happen). That’s the most interesting difference between the different understandings of “rules” I saw in class: the laws of physics are a truth that cannot be broken; the laws of man are broken daily.

So what does this mean in the context of game rules? The conclusion I’ve reached is that there are three types:

• The first type, physics-like rules, are probably not actually enforceable when we talk about games, unless you want to recycle rules enforced by nature (for example, saying that when you kick a ball up in soccer, it comes back down). I suppose these rules exist in every game, but there’s no point in stating them because suggestion opposite rules, or attempting to remove the rules, would mean that nature itself would cause players to break the rules of the game.
• The second type, law-like rules, are the most common. For example, in chess there are two teams of pieces with distinct colours, black and white. There’s nothing to stop someone creating a new piece, a red elephant, and placing it on the board during a game. This would be in violation of that rule, which means they would lose.
• The third type is the type which had some interesting discussion in class, and involved the case of taking forever to make a move. These rules are implied and not explicitly stated. These unstated rules originate from our personal experience of growing up in a human culture. “Players take turns making moves” implies to many people that these moves are within a reasonable time. The difficulty with this set of rules is that they’re very difficult, if not impossible, to define. A point raised is class is that what a “reasonable” amount of time is cannot be defined in a rulebook. The definition of a “reasonable” amount of time resides in our culture, and is a concept in our collective consciousness that cannot be defined with a number. Is it 20 minutes? 5 minutes? There are too many variables to consider, so if a number is going to be chosen as a definition, is will undoubtedly by arbitrary, and incorrect in many situations.

I think this is probably one of the most incoherent posts I’ve ever written but I don’t have any time to clear it up right now. Hopefully I can get around to making my thoughts here a bit more structured some time soon.

What I’m going to be looking at throughout is how better simulation (through graphics, animation, AI, sound, input, and everything else all together) changes our emotional and psychological reaction to what we experience in games.

Hope I can squeeze 10k words out of this.

The second talk, by a Ph.D. student, John, was also interesting. He comes from an English-teaching background and doesn’t seem to have any technical experience at all. He made lots of points which might cause debate. He pointed out that he knew this about the points he was making, but I felt like many of the points were simply uninformed. The lack of experience in gaming and technology became obvious when he spoke about wanting to achieve things is games which were not technically possible with current technology (such as a natural language AI interface with NPCs).

He spoke of the “Kutaragi effect”, a term he used to describe designing software for future generation hardware. I think this is generally being done though. If you look at the likes of the Unreal and Crytek engines, each iteration is released into a market where very few consumer hardware can run them at first. Eventually hardware catches up to the game technology and it becomes playable fully-featured. I was interested when he spoke about plans to implement a game based on this observed “Kutaragi effect”. I think all but the very best games programmers would be hard-pushed to come up with an implementation which could be described as being more advanced than the supporting hardware.

Sorry if I sound very negative about the talk, but I felt frustrated when hearing comments about the end of console gaming and the end of first person shooters. I don’t think that the appeal of combat games is ever going to go away, no matter how much John dislikes the genre. It’s a fundamental element of human nature they appeal to and even the most culturally and biologically “advanced” humans are going to enjoy that gameplay.

And consoles are getting much more attention than PCs in the gaming world recently. Blizzard and Bethesda seem to be the only ones preferring it, and Blizzard’s the only one of those two that’s exclusively on PC. MMORPGs seem to be the only genres left as PC-exclusive. Large-scale RPGs such as Oblivion moved over to consoles about the same time as FPS games did. Emerging popularity of cloud computing was offered as an argument for the death of the console. First of all, cloud computing doesn’t exclude consoles. Even if a console is only a thin client to a server-hosted game, the enjoyment of playing your cloud game in the sitting room in front of the TV as opposed to at the computer desk in front of your 17″ monitor is going to keep consoles in some form. Secondly (and most importantly), infrastructure at the current level of technology (and I’m going to pick a random number and say for the next 15-20 years) isn’t going to support real-time interaction with a high enough quality to support a thin game client, unless you’re simply going to make it like Second Life where game data is downloaded displayed on a client which is far from thin. There have been numerous attempts at streaming game video which is being generated on a remote machine and none have been effective yet. I lived with a developer of software aiming to do just that and he explained many of the problems he was having, from the lack of an adequate codec, to lack of bandwidth, to lack of low-latency infrastructure.

A point I did agree with was the common storytelling elements used in many films and games. When John presented a summary of short story he had written, I immediately thought it was exactly the same as Sliders and very similar to Quantum Leap. That’s why it’s interesting that he brought up Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces“. The book describes how many popular stories are based on the same few plot devices, Sliders and Quantum Leap included. I recommend checking out the wikipedia article and seeing how many movies you can apply it to. All my favourites, from The Matrix to Labyrinth, are covered.

We started on a 512/128 ADSL connection. That was crazy fast for the time, having been on 56k dialup until then. This was seeing about 48kbps go up to 512kbps on my downloads and it was nuts. Eventually we got upgraded to 3Mb/385kb. Eircom said we were going up to 7.6Mb/768kb but it didn’t happen until I called them three times. The first two times I called, their internal account management server was down and they couldn’t update my information to get me upgraded.

After finding out that we could be paying less every month for a better service, and that changing would have negligible downtime (a couple of hours), I called Magnet and started the move.

It’s a 24Mb ADSL2+ package we’re on now but not getting the full speed. It tends to go between 12.5 and 17Mbps, depending on the mood of the line. I might end up downgrading to their 10Mbps connection altogether and save the money, seeing as the line’s not at its full potential.

Anyway, the good things:

• No download cap. (Just a fair use policy)
• Twice as fast as Eircom.
• Public IP addresses for each machine. This worried me at first but the firewall on the DSLAM keeps my netbios (windows file sharing) from being visible to the whole world.
• Competent and helpful tech support. Sure, it should be a given, but coming from eircom it’s a breath of fresh air.
• Magnet PCTV. It’s a new internet TV service which streams RTE1, 2, TV3, TG4, Bubble Hits, and a load of RTE and BBC radio to Mac/Windows machines through Magnet’s custom client.
• Ridiculously low pings, which stay low even when BitTorrent is running! Skype problems have disappeared, except for when the person I’m talking to has a bad connection.

The not so good:

• I do feel like I’ve lost some control over my network since I’m not running a firewall, DHCP server or gateway on my own network anymore. It’s nice to know that they’re looking after this so I don’t have to worry about it, but I don’t like having to call them to change the modem’s wireless or firewall settings. I could put a router between the modem and everything else, but to be honest, I’m liking the public IPs on everything.
• The phone line is VoIP over their modem so my dad’s in the process of rewiring everything to make sense in this new context. Phones will no longer work in a power outage, but as long as Magnet keeps its emergency generators working this shouldn’t be a problem.

Attraction to Wargames

In class we were discussing wargames and what the attraction to this genre is. These games are generally more attractive to males than they are to females. I believe this is simply because they appeal to human traits which are stronger in men than women: those being the desire for power, and voyeurism.

Power

The desire for power is satisfied by conquering, through military or political means, human or AI enemies. There is a lot of satisfaction to be had when you’ve suffered great losses but manage to rally an offensive, perhaps with the assistance of an ally, to get revenge on and defeat the enemy responsible.

Guys love to feel power and I’m sure it’s the cause of many atrocities in human history including murder, rape, and war. By defeating enemies we can feel this sense of power. However the point I believe to be more attractive is voyeurism.

Voyeurism

Yesterday I was watching some gameplay videos of the unreleased Xbox 360 game “Gears of War 2″. It’s well-known as a seminal “dude’s game”, in which you play a beefy space marine and use projectile weapons (the designers say projectile weapons feel much meatier than lasers) to blast alien enemies into bloody chunks. We guys eat up this genre and the Gears of War designers are the experts of this genre. The feeling of power is also definitely there, but if you compare it to a game like Age of Empires, which doesn’t appeal much to the voyeur, it’s clear that there is an attraction to the gore and visual manifestations of pure testosterone.

In the video I watched, I noticed that I shouted “YEAH!!” out loud when Marcus (the player’s space marine character) blasted an alien’s face off with a weapon new to Gears of War 2. It’s the same feeling I got when I first watched Neo shoot the security guard in “The Lobby” scene of the Matrix. Or when watching Christian Bale’s “Gun-Kata” in “Equilibrium”. Or watching Jet Lee fight a literal mountain of bad guys at the end of “The One”. Or the car chase in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof”. As a 20-year-old male, I really love watching this sort of thing.

And the Gears of War 2 developers know we love this. The love it too! A new feature in GoW2 allows you to hit a button when over an enemy on the ground to perform an execution. This doesn’t add any new functionality beyond allowing you see a badass animation (and humiliating your enemy through that animation if you’re in multiplayer).

The point I’m getting to is that this is a major element in games and explains why they’re so popular with teenage males. The Wii presents a library of games without these elements which appeal to people outside of this typical “gamer” or “hardcore gamer” demographic. However, I believe that this demographic (myself included as a member), have come to expect this sort of exhibitionism from games and our inner voyeur isn’t satisfied by watching Miis play with hula-hoops and would rather see a nano-suit enhanced soldier blow up an alien spaceship with a portable tactical nuclear device or something. (That was a Crysis reference, by the way.)

Types of Voyeurism

Though it’s easy to dismiss this voyeurism as just a taste for blood, I would argue that it goes deeper than that. To begin with (and admittedly, not going any deeper than the blood), there is the female figure. Puzzle-solving isn’t the only reason that Tomb Raider is popular with guys and if you walk down a street in Akihabara, Tokyo, the obsession with female characters among gamers becomes immediately apparent. Sure, it’s obvious that guys like “hot girls”, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a major attraction to many games. (Who’s played Half Life 2 and not fallen in love with tomboyish Alyx?)

Now, the deeper level: the graphics. One of the biggest complaints about the Wii from the “hardcore gamers” is the graphics. Games such as Crysis which use cutting-edge graphics technologies when released definitely have an appeal that’s not there with games, which may have similar gameplay but not as shiny a presentation. Crysis certainly wouldn’t have been as immersive without the graphics behind it. There is a great appreciation for this technology from the audience and a YouTube search will present you with buckets of videos demonstrating Crysis’s graphics. At one point in the game I was being chased but had to stop to look in awe at the moonbeams shining down through the jungle canopy overhead.

Other Appealing Characteristics of Wargames

Wargames do much more than satiate the sadist inside every male youth, but provide intellectual stimulation. If it’s a real-time strategy game, there is satisfaction to be had in problem-solving such as over-coming economic difficulties in your nation/base, or such as planning strategies of attack and defense. Or perhaps it’s the strong storyline in games like the Command and Conquer series that’s attractive. Or maybe the co-operative gameplay in games such as Halo. However attractive those aspects are though, I don’t believe that they’re as important to your average Xbox-playing, Family Guy-watching, 4chan-lurking, teenage male as the “coolness” of seeing your enemies die.

The success of the Wii demonstrates that games don’t have to fit the characteristics I’ve described to be successful, but I believe that to be successful to the demographic I’ve been talking about, it’s absolutely crucial to have the “voyeuristic thrill”. And wargames are the perfect platform to deliver that experience.

I’ve been hearing both in and out of class that ludology and narratology are generally considered opposing theories. Likewise, ludologists and narratologists generally do not like each others’ ideas. It’s probably from a lack of reading experience, but myself and others in the class are having difficulty seeing why the ideas are said to be incompatible.

Personally, I believe that both are equally relevant. How relevant either is in a particular game isn’t, however, entirely because of the designer’s decisions; it’s largely due to the player’s take on a game.

Let me give you the example of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, affectionately known as “Mohaa” or “Moh” by my friends when we play it. The seminal game of the Medal of Honor series is so dear to us that we do our very best to annunciate the acronym, no matter how unnatural it is. I love the single-player story-mode, but the multiplayer team deathmatch mode (like all deathmatch games), has no story whatsoever. For most players of this game-mode, there is very little narratological attraction. However, compared to most other players, my particular group of friends has a much stronger narratological attraction.

This is because of “House”, a game-mode we created ourselves. We load a particular map with a house/bar into which one can enter. Each team must fight to occupy this house, and this new objective adds not only a new ludological point of view to the battle, but gives a story to what’s going on. Instead of allied and axis forces running around shooting each other without meaning, there is now a depth to the game that didn’t exist before. It’s still the same game: none of the assets or code has changed. It’s just a personal perspective which enhances the game by adding our own story and objective.

On a final note, I gave up on Spore pretty quickly and am currently totally engrossed in Crysis. Is that because of the lack of narrative in Spore and strong linear story in Crysis or is it a problem of ludology? Or something else?

Yesterday I started playing Spore. At the first stage, where your character is some sort of water-based organism, I died lots of times and found some more effective placements of mouths/spikes on my creature. Dying put me right back into the game, where I left off.

On the next level, I left the water and started hunting on land. I found out how to use different attacks and when I died I had to start again from the nest, which wasn’t a problem. Nothing much changed when on the next level I was able to organize other members of my group to hunt in a pack.

When I go to the tribal stage, I was disappointed when my tribe was wiped out and had the start from a basic village again, but discovered that rather than attacking buildings directly, I should have been attacking the villagers and then clearing out the buildings after wiping out the population.

Carrying on to the civilisation stage, I quickly took over my continent and wiped out a few other civilizations. However, I made the mistake of relying on natural resources to give me “sporebucks,” instead of investing in factories. I didn’t realise that the natural resources would eventually dry up and was left without resources and with enemies attacking from both sides of the continent. I found I was able to survive but quickly got tired of straggling along with one or two cities at a time (out of twelve) and quit around 2am.

At the earlier stages, the penalty for messing up wasn’t so high. Just being sent back to the start of the level of a starting position was fine, but at the civilisation stage, I had a totally incompetent economy and no way of getting out. I was waiting for the enemy to attack so I could finally lose, but they were busy on their continent trashing each other’s cities. I’ll go back in today and try to get back to a fresh civilisation level and conquer the world.

The only major complaint about the game I have (except for the DRM.. boo!) is that the minimap doesn’t change with your camera position or orientation in the world. The world is a sphere and the map is 2D. If you’re at a corner of the map and looking south, it’s very difficult to make any sense of the map at all. And when an enemy city has the luck to be placed near a corner, it’s difficult to visualize any attack vector except from the one obvious quadrant.

Well, that’s the end of this entry. Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting ideas that reviewing games I’m playing in future posts.

• Came home and stayed up until when I should be going to sleep anyway. Went to bed. Woke up at a normal time.
• Completely missed a night’s sleep. Slept for an hour at lunchtime the next day. Went to bed at a normal time. Woke up at a normal time.
• Been fine since

Sitting in CSIS now listening to Might Crown by CROWN JUGGLAZ. Far east rulaz! Thanks to J-Foat at Havok for introducing me to these guys.

Had a couple of classes yesterday. Looking like this semester might be fun. We have one module which is project based as well as the FYP but the variation should keep it interesting, provided there’s time to get everything done.

Got to hear how everyone got screwed over by UL with their co-ops yesterday too. Going to try to talk to someone about it and get them to listen to our feedback on our experiences. A lot of people didn’t complete their co-ops; including the reason that the university couldn’t place some people!! Even on campus!

Anyway, it’s good to be back in Ireland and back in university. Experience in San Francisco couldn’t have been better but I was missing home.

I wish we’d have lockers like that in San Francisco or in Ireland, but I can imagine people breaking into them or making off with them. On the bus on the way home from the airport I got a funny smell. Some girls in the back were smoking marijuana and talking about their probation. I know lots of people who genuinely enjoy the “colourful” citizens of San Francisco but a middle-class white college kid like me can do without that…

Today I was waiting for the 71 to take me home from downtown to 32nd and Noriega. I called the Muni phone number when nothing was coming and they said one would be along in 5 minutes, then another in 11. I waited and waited and nothing came. I called again and explained and they started to log a complaint. As they were finishing they said the next would be along in 1 minute. I asked the lady to wait with me and tell me what her screen said. Sure enough she said that the bus was arriving, and then changed to say that the bus had left and the next would be along again later. And yes, I was at the right bus stop

I love the Muni’s phone-in service but the actual service itself on the street is pretty poor. One of the guys at work is doing his best to boycott them based on his own experience but I’m pretty much a captive customer. Missing Japan