This is a repost and edit from a couple of years ago, you may now replace WOW with farmville if you so wish. You can also replace Braid with any indie faggotry. The argument is exactly the same.

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Braid’s marketing rubs me the wrong way, I understand why it is necessary, I understand exactly what it is. Still it makes me feel icky and regret that it’s success will push us further in this direction.

Mr blow is known for the opinion that World of Warcraft is an evil drug-like substance (Braid is presumably not an evil drug-like substance.)

However, things are not that simple. When dealing with a complex system strange results are the norm.

Warcraft has a social game, the game is “What is the fastest way of grinding?”, “What is the best way to get this super drop?”. Questions that give complex answers.

Braid also includes a social game, it is a “What the fuck is this pseudo intellectual emo fag story?”. This is intended to increase the reach of the game by encouraging discussion. Emo fags like to talk, preferably about issues that reinforce how emotelligent they are.

Braids design encourages people to look at the list of control keys and believe that they are an important secret that will unlock the meaning of the braid universe. Construct elaborate theories that fit all the “facts” perfectly and must be true. Then to launch on a religious crusade, demanding that people understand that their interpretation of an intentionally vague text is the right one and that all heretics must die.

A little extreme but braids meta game is DESIGNED to produce the start of that behavior. Once that ball is rolling it is very hard to get it to stop.

WOW on the other hand is a godless grind, a neutered game, but still focused on being a game. The meta game of WOW is  comprised of building up scientific data about the underlying  world and then attempting to use this data to gain a better understanding of the hidden mechanics, experimenting and learning.

This is called the scientific method.

Which puts us in an interesting place, WOW may be an evil grind but is superstition better than science?

I think not.

I believe that games which distance themselves from being games and instead smother themselves in bullshit and linear story are the evil.

Would you like to know more?

1. http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/09/gamesfrontiers_0908
2. FAGGOT -> http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16392

What are you doing to make your audience smarter?

Guerilla ontology isn’t just two silly words placed next to each other for girlie giggles.

It is every creators responsibility to encourage anyone who will listen to switch on their brain.

Wake the fuck up.

Try thinking for a change.

And other generally unwelcome behaviour.

I’m doing my part, are you?

Would you like to know more?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_ontology
   

A long time ago I decided to ugrade my jamma arcade machine with a console harness. To give you an idea of the time I chose a PS1 console. It worked. Things like r-type delta and the emulated williams games worked really well in a big heavy chipboard box experience. I also played a lot of the first tony hawks game in a fake arcade environment. An experience I bet no one else shared.

An arcade harness consists simply of controller input and video output. For the video output I added a scart socket and for the input I took apart and wired up some cheap PS1 controllers.

So, the arcade machine pretends to be an rgb scart monitor and a couple of PS1 controllers.

I figured that PS1 controllers would continue to exist and I would be able to swap any console into this setup simply by buying some converters to PS1 controllers.

I was right.

I was also wrong.

Although PS2 controllers look remarkably like PS1 controllers they are actually completely different. Every converter you can buy has to support PS1 and PS2 controllers. The PS2 part works, the PS1 part pretends to work.

You can still buy PS1 controller adapters for any console, unfortunately these adapters really only support PS2 controllers. Sure when you press a button that button eventually registers. Probably, half a second or so later, if you are lucky.

This sort of lag makes their use unacceptable.

I tried buying many different adapters, each of them had the same problem too much lag and even dropped buttons.

This problem isn’t very well documented, since it kinda works and many gamers simply blame themselves rather than understanding the latency issues. Mostly complaints are about dancemats since many playstation dancemats are PS1 controllers not PS2. Various forums full of people serious about dancemats complain but still don’t really understand the problem.

Eventually I had to rip out the PS1 controller harness and replace it with an XBOX one. MAMEoX FTW BTW.

Which brings me to my point. 150ms of control latency is the same as switching from playing a game at 60fps to playing a  game at 6fps.

Sure it still works.

Sure many gamers will not understand what is going on and blame themselves.

Sure you can sell it as being acceptable.

Sure you can go fuck yourself because only a casual gamer could be happy playing twitchy games with that sort of control lag. 

The game streaming idea sold by onlive and others looks great for secure MMO style games, a thin client is ideal and yay you can even play on netbooks.

This is all good.

But they keep promoting it as the perfect thing for twitchy FPS games.

Which just smells of bullshit.

I’m not even convinced it can work a mouse pointer.

Would you like to know more?

1. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive-lag-analysis

Polly+Morfs : Nerd is to Geek.

Death is a problem in MMOs, its a problem simply because it exists.

Death should “of course” be a penalty of somekind but neither the designers or the players really want it to be one.

What follows is a possible solution.

#1 no penalty for death, it is just an inconvenience. The main cost here is that death knocks people back and disrupts group activities. If people start dying you have to reorganise.

#2 a “death penalty” cost is applied upon entering a zone/dungeon whatever, a cost that can be quite harsh. This also helps with creating consumables in the economy.

Now, you must play to recoup the investment you have just made, the inconvenience of dying is just a mild inconvenience.

You start off having already lost and you keep playing to turn that loss into a win. Or you give up, admit this area is too hard and stop trying. In this case even recouping a small amount of your initial loss will seem like victory.

It’s risk/reward with a real cost for failure but is still close to the MMO standard of progress progress progress grind grind grind. Shifting the fail penalty to the beginning is just a mental trick to fool the loss adverse humans.

I’ve seen this partially applied but not as strongly as I’d like to try :)

Happiness for hardcore and carebears?

Who knows, I figure it may be worth a try though.