Day 14: Osmos Demo

I'm now up to 11 in 14 days. Some of my posts have been a little more rushed that I'd normally like, but it's hard to dive in deep while I'm on the road. Either I'm way too focused on a specific project or I'm spread way too thin amongst social/family engagements.

Today I played through the Osmos demo. It's another PC download from the PAX 10 list. It seems intended to be a nice time waster game that incorporates elements of flOw, Katamari Damacy, and Spore. You start as a blob and try to accumulate mass by swallowing other blobs. Key barriers to success: You expend blob mass to propel yourself forward; if you bump into larger or hostile blogs you lose.

The way I really wanted to play this game was with some sort of controller, sitting on a couch, watching on my projector. The soothing music and pleasing visuals make me want to be in a very relaxed position.

The demo was a little short, I think, and I did not walk away from it knowing how much more content there was and how many more game play variants there were. In other words, it was hard to assess whether the amount and quality of content would be worth a purchase.

A few quibbles with the game include:

• Osmos seems more of a simulation than a game. This is mostly fine if my goal is to simply float around and try and pick up successively larger objects. What really needs to be emphasized is some sort of risk-reward decision making. Right now, game play modes are mostly about how to deal with subtle variations in the target (does it have AI? does it have similar polarity as the reflector?)
• Keyboard shortcuts are hard to discover and hard to use. "Alt-O" is not a very discoverable command, especially if the player quickly learns that mashing the keyboard more generally does not yield useful results. There are few enough controls that it seems like they could be taguht effectively through structured encountes -- and that there might be a place that lists all shortcuts from within the main game start screen.

Co-op/social Dungeon Master: Left 4 Dead as a proof of concept

So, I never did play the original Dungeon Keeper, but before I got into the games industry I did try to DM some modules using the Neverwinter Nights mod tools. There were some cool features for both dungeon construction and real-time DM'ing. But there were a number of hurdles:

• Content creation was time intensive. The level editor was pretty usable, but it still took many hours to craft an adventure that you might only play once with friends.
• Too many tools. In the hands of an experienced designer with lots of iterative playtesting feedback, this makes for great, polished, balanced dungeons. As one-offs, with an amateur designer and just a few friends (or maybe the occasional stranger) playing the game, it was hard to generate quality entertainment.
• DM'ing in real time could be a lonely, unthankful, and potentially overwhelming task. You needed to keep track of one or more adventurers who were navigating your dungeon in real time.

Juxtapose this with some of the game play elements and systems that exist in Left 4 Dead and I think I see potential for a really cool role playing game system that encourages social play -- both as adventurers and as DMs. 

I kind of stumbled onto this line of thinking while trying to break down why spawn times of upwards of 30 seconds (as Infected) or even longer (as Survivor) didn't seem so horrible as a player experience. What I realized, as a game designer/user experience person, is that I could spend this time navigating the level (through other players' eyes, or as a ghost when I did spawn in as Infected) and essentially watching the movie of the game play unfold. 

As an Infected caracter (and like a movie director or Dungeon Master) I could choose to let things unfold, or, through my own actions and communications with my team mates, guide and direct the Survivors' game play experience.

Some revelations:

• Messing around with, essentially, dev/debug tools can be fun as a game play experience. Another examples of this is "the line" feature in Forza. Originally designed to help debug race tracks, team members (and later playtesters) liked the feature so much that they spruced it up visually and added it as a game play feature. In L4D, you are able to "spy" on the world through other players eyes, move around as "ghosts", see and move through walls, and access areas of the map that are inaccessible to Survivors. In a sense when you play as Infected you are playing the role of Dungeon Master. 
• Well, more like Dungeon Master's assistant. Someone else (the game developer and designer) has done a lot of the hard work in balancing and polishing the core experience. You get to "tweak" this experience given a limited toolset that is fun to use and accessible via entertaining game play mechanics (instead of through code or script). 
• Actually, more like a community of Dungeon Master assistants. There can be division of labor, group strategizing, and socially reinforcing "atta boy" chatter.  

In other words, the tight constraints (basic content is already balanced, polished, and fun at its core) and social nature of DM'ing makes for a great experience for all players involved. Players can trip and fall into a fun experience that, when the DMs are firing on all cylinders, can become sublime for both DMs and adventurers.

One constraint that Left 4 Dead must operate under that is worth considering is that players must find playing as Infected or Survivor equally (or almost equally) enjoyable. There is some leeway as players swap sides as part of the campaign, but if people generally hated playing one side vs. the other side, the Vs. mode wouldn't be fun to play (unless preferences were split 50-50 and players were just constantly placed in matches playing for the side they preferred). 

It's also worth thinking about role preferences that might not be evenly distributed -- and that may even be underrepresented by current gaming experiences.

Sure, class-based games (like Valve's Team Fortress and many other RPGs and shooters) and other asymetrical play experiences (e.g., RTS games like Starcraft with different races or Rise of Nations with different national powers) exist to fill these kinds of desires.

But what about game players who want to "play" as Dungeon Master? Folks who are willing to do a little more preparation and behind the scenes work in order to direct other players' experience? And I'm thinking about it more broadly than just in terms of stimulating the creation of quality "user generated content" (e.g., games like Spore and Little Big Planet and, of course, most of Valve's own PC game line up).

I think about DMs much the way I think about content contributors to social computing sites. Some folks love writing reviews, posting to discussion boards, uploading videos, and acting as matron or concierge in chat rooms. These folks derive personal pleasure in doing work that improves the experience of the vastly larger number of content consumers. "Deriving pleasure" means that there is a feedback loop (kudos from fellow content contributors and from content consumers) and that that these kudos outweigh the potential pain involved in creating the content in the first place.

The question then becomes: What can we learn from successful social computing sites that would apply to developing the kind of game (or game platform) that would create great game play for players by encouraging people who love to DM game content to participate?

Some other thoughts:

• What social/co-operative components are critical to make both content creation and real time (in game) participation fun for DMs?
• What feedback loop elements are needed (what are the internal goals and desires of people who like to DM? Are there a few prototypical subcategories or personas of DMs? how do we reinforce their goals/desires?)
• How much freedom is enough to keep DMs interested, but not too much to be either overwhelming or result in unbalanced/unpolished game play?
• What should be the balance between "away from the game" planning and development (e.g., using content creation and editing tools) and real time participation (e.g., wandering around as ghosts, spawning in as NPCs or creatures)?

Whew. A fun digression.

Spore... Bye...

Well, I tried the "Civilization" phase of Spore tonight. It was pretty much an impenetrable mess of unplayability. Impossible to tell friend from foe. Impossible to conduct useful diplomacy because you needed to remember made up city names in order to get an ally to assist you (without even the aid of team color as a mnemonic). Terrible feedback: I had no idea how to interact with the neutral villages. Hard to wield 3-d camera -- unconstrained freedom means that I can get myself lost and into disadvantageous angles.

The weirdest part of it all is that they had so clearly ripped elements from the greats: Civilization, Rise of Nations, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires... But all they could come up with is Impossible Creatures -- a great concept, but quite unplayable for all of the above listed reasons. I finally Alt-F4'd out of the game when I couldn't figure out why my apparent ally got pissed off at me and turned on me after we'd taken out a foe's city together. Burgle.

Of course, none of this was done deliberately. I think the biggest "enemy" of good usability in this case was the desire to allow the user unfettered freedom to create things and interact with the world as they saw fit. Unfortunately this means that players are going to be penalized for "bad" decisions (positioning the camera in a place where it's hard to control units; design units that are hard to read against the background; minimize team color to allow for custom looks; etc) when it comes to game play.

One of the coolest, but slightly hidden, features of Spore is the volume of community content. Once I figured out how to simply grab someone else's prefab building or vehicle and drop it into my world, I realized that something cool was there. This is where friends could share funny experiments and where the virtual community could surface awesome creations through voting and form cool alliances and clans who worked together on larger projects.

Unfortunately most of this potential is lost behind the few "tic tac toe" buttons that indicate you can go to the Spore community for content... It's conceivable that you could play the game for a long time without ever realizing that there is a ton of content being created behind the scenes by other creative individuals. 

Not only is finding the content hard to do, it is also hard to discover GOOD content because there is no way to filter it in terms of "coolness," however the community defines it. I can sort by date created, date downloaded, and type of content. But nowhere can I see any social stats like how many people gave it a thumbs up? How many worlds it already populated? How many had been built/harvested/destroyed... All these stats exist, why not expose them to users in interesting ways.

Of course, there may not be great community data yet because active sharing (thumbs up or marking as inappropriate) are buried deep in the UI. There should be frictionless ways for users to compliment other players' hard work. There should also be lots of passive measures (how many times inspected; how many times encountered; how many times befriended vs. killed) to let people know that their creations are getting their time in the lime light. These are the kinds of data being collected at community sites like Amazon.com and Flickr.com and in community game worlds like Everybody Votes for the Wii.

It would also be nice if there were some more social presence data. Why do players have to be so isolated from each other? Why can't I open up my borders and let observers and players into my world? 

When I think about all the hype and all the potential, I guess I'm left to wonder: When does the Lego MMO Beta start? In essence Spore provides us with lots of lego bricks but no meaningful and enjoyable way to share and play with others both asyncrhonously and syncrhonously.

Spore... Sigh...

So, I'm still stuck on the "tribal" stage in Spore. Sigh. I'm on normal difficulty and need to figure out how to put it on "easy".

The strange thing is that I'm no RTS dummy. I'm not a competitive player, but I've worked on several RTS games and can usually hold my own against an average player -- or a default AI setting.

Spore suffers from enough usability issues to make this whole process annoying and frustrating instead of challenging and fun.

• Even though I'm obviously having difficulty, there seems to be no dynamic difficulty adjustment. I get crushed the same way every time: Trying to defend one group, attack another, and be diplomatic with a third. I feel like there is some hidden "correct" way to do things that I'm not able to discover.
• As an RTS, this game has all sorts of problems that most 2d and 3d RTS games have solved like: Unit identification (I can't tell the difference between various unit types; it's also hard to tell friend from foe some times); unit selection (there is so much popup text and the camera is allowed to zoom/pan to really into unusable positions); camera controls in a 3d world (why do I need to do so much of it?)... and the list goes on.

I really want to see the rest of the content so I guess I'll try and figure out how to lower the difficulty level (I know there's a setting, I just couldn't adjust it while in game). Failing that I guess I'll have to look on Youtube or GameFAQ for some hints.

• 
  

Spore, Braid & Nintendogs...

First, Nintendogs. I broke down and bought Liza (and I) a DS Lite the other day. I thought it might be more relaxing for her than playing games on her huge MacBook Pro. And I know there are a ton of great games available for it. And I am somehow hoping that I find time to do some DS gaming myself.

Sadly Nintendogs wasn't very accessible as a game. It mostly entailed a lot of yelling at the screen, having the game tutorial break on us (we couldn't progress no matter how hard we tried), and searching the manual for the cheat code to delete the save games so we could start anew. Thankfully, Liza now has a Corgi puppy that is somewhat trainable -- but it shouldn't have taken a thorough reading of the manual and the tedious reverse engineering required to figure out things like "2 syllable pet names work better than monosyllabic names".

We're going to have to borrow some other games or else the DS is going to just sit and gather dust. 

Braid has continued to amaze me. I think that one of the levels (where you have a shadow version of yourself) is too mindblowing for me to ever complete without cheating, but I actually believe I might solve the rest of the puzzles with perseverence. And not just because of masochistic or obsessive-compulsive behavior. It's actually quite pleasurable to try and work out the puzzles even if requires being "stuck" for long periods of time as I try to reverse engineer the level. The game is really making me realize that I need to think more deeply about what it means to be "stuck" and under what conditions this becomes frustrating and leads to quitting vs. when it is OK and actually motivates me to engage in deeper, intensely pleasurable, problem solving behavior.

Spore had me going for a while. After conceding that world exploration and creature upgrades were fun enough to outweigh unsatisfying combat (impossible to tell friend-foe in the heat of battle; impossible to select your guy; impossible to run away when you're about to die), I wasn't prepared for how frustrating the RTS portion of the game would be. Combat was somewhat unmanageable and unexciting when I only controlled one creature. It was completely unmanageable and frustrating during the "Tribal" stage of the game. The camera and controls were part of the issue, but there was an even bigger issue with friend-foe detection and selection. It was impossible to manage my units in any strategic fashion and inevitably we were killed off time and time again. I tried to figure out the social game mechanics of the game (which were kind of fun to play with at the creature level) but found myself puzzled and lost.

I'll probably fire it up again at some point as I'd like to explore more of the features and progress through the game. I am also curious to see how the social and community aspects of the game continue to develop:

• Will there be socially connected instances or places to hang out? Will there be a deeper guild or alliance system?
• Will there be mods -- puzzles or scripted scenarios that tell a narrative or provide some other guided experience?
• Will there be a better way to streamline the discovery of cool new community content and provide rewarding feedback to quality content contributors? I left a comment for some guy who created a creature I befriended (and that became an effective tank for me) but I never heard back. Nor do I know whether he benefitted in any way by getting a note of thanks from me.

In some ways Spore reminds me of Impossible Creatures. The idea (custom creature creator + RTS) sounds great and yields some fun units to play with. But, ultimately, the game suffered because it just wasn't that fun to play.

Housekeeping...

I played a bunch of Braid today, lost several hours of game play due to a corrupted save file in Spore, and completed a few missions in GTA IV (my fiancee wants me to off my in-game girlfriend -- but she must know something is up because she is ducking my calls).

I have LOTS to talk about re: Braid, but not enough time to do so tonight.

I've also got No More Heroes and Alone in the Dark sitting around waiting to be played from my Gamefly account.

And I've got a half dozen 360 demos (XBLA and full retail) and a bunch of DVDs lying around.

Time to get to work.

Spore... First impressions & PC gaming redux

Well, I'm reminded of what the "state of the art" is in terms of the PC install experience now that I've got Spore up and running on my machine.

There are downloads and installs (and uninstalls of previous downloads) and Readme.txt files and debug commands and...

You know what I'm talking about.

It's a tough call. Users want customization and community content. Console makers and publishers seem to need a much more closed ecosystem. So the pain gets pushed back on the user in terms of having to develop the technical expertise necessary to participate.

Interestingly, social computing applications have been trying to solve this by lowering the hurdles to participation. Utility must be instantly grokkable for an application to succeed, then there must be a sharing pipeline that fits within normal social computing scenarios. No fancy plugins should be required -- just an updated browser.

Given the new focus on browser stability and performance (Chrome, IE, and Firefox are all trying to address this with new releases) and the relatively frictionless barrier to entry for web based games, it's no surprise that more casual games (and casual game portals) are where we expect to see exponential growth in the next few years.

I wonder how growth on the EA Online, Steam, and Blizzard.net offerings (digital distribution of PC content) will compare with browser based distribution systems that provide a console like user experience? 

I'm not saying there isn't going to be a market for AAA PC games... But how do you take 14 million active Steam users and make it 140 million users? 

Probably not by requiring Readme.txt files and console commands.

As far as Spore itself, I'm having a little fun with it. It seems kind of like a cross between Viva Pinata and FloW and some of the other Wrightian Sim games. The game has a very polished feel, but doesn't yet feel like it is going to have much depth in terms of creating intricate social and cultural puzzles for the player to solve in the ecosystems that are (I assume) evolving in response to the player's actions.

I think that the part I find least satisfying about the game so far is that I don't get a chance to really leave my mark on the world. I don't think I get to run into any of my genetic ancestors. I haven't yet started cross breeding with other tribes, but hopefully there will be some interesting emergent evolution where my allies mate with my tribe members and create their own mutations.

I'm also wondering whether there is a deeper social game -- or whether players can only show movies and pictures to their friends. Like Viva Pinata or Animal Crossing or even Mii Parades, I want to have creatures from other people's worlds making the leap into mine. Not in a sucky "all the 13 year old griefers dump their level 900 spider of chaos onto my little herbivores" way, but in a socially interesting way.

Most of all, I really want to be playing this game on my couch with a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard. Yes the interface is more elegant than Viva Pinata's, but I think that as a casual and accessible game there's no reason why options can't be pared down and presented in a console friendly way. I'm assuming that this is already in the works.

Quick update: Spore, EA shared content, and more to follow...

As I download Spore from the EA Online Store I figure I'll do a quick update on what I've been up to. I'll drill in more over the next few days.

These last few weeks have mostly been about social gaming on the one hand and GTA IV on the other. I must admit that I've really been loving GTA IV and can't wait to spend several more hours on it (hopefully today). 

Most of my social gaming has been on Facebook. I've already talked about Scramble and Wordscraper in previous posts. 

I've also been playing 2 "inferior" (at least in my mind) games simply because other friends play them and I can't convince them to make the switch. One is Word Twist, which I consider inferior to Text Twirl for the main reason that it doesn't force players to swap turns. This means that a player can blow through the game before any other player takes a turn. This makes the end-game less exciting (at least to me). The other is Word Challenge, which is a leaderboard game where you anagram words against a clock. The scoring convention is interesting and allows for some interesting risk-reward game play, but I think it's boring because there is no head-to-head competition. Well, there is... But I haven't tried it out yet because I prefer other games (and because I'm so far ahead of my friends they don't want to play me).

As I mentioned above, I'm currently downloading Spore. I have no idea whether I'll like it. The Creature Creator was fun to play with for a bit, but the novelty wore off as I started to crave actual  game play. What I'm most interested in is how Spore enters the social computing cloud of consciousness. With direct links to YouTube (and I've got to believe Facebook and MySpace) this game has potential to rock the SNS world.

EA seems to be pushing this idea very hard (and I'll bet effectively) with other franchises as well. I was cruising a Titans fan board and someone had posted links to movies of his favorite Madden 09 plays. Yep. The game offers players the ability to save and render out highlight films and then post them to the EA sharing site. The sharing site itself was pretty lame (no great way to surface additional/related content; no community rating system; etc) and it's a shame they didn't just partner with YouTube on this like Spore did. But it's a great step in the right direction for what people crave: Shared social content. Way to go EA!

These are, indeed, exciting times in the space of socially shared gaming experiences and content creation.