Here we are at November 19th, 101 days into my GenCon Year.  Where are we?

Well, I’ve completed an overhaul of my Game Chef 2007 entry, Eidolon - now retitled Terrible World.  I’ve created a couple of prototypes and I’m alpha-testing it to make sure that the system mechanics aren’t completely out of whack.

Second, I’m in the process of formally writing up Strangers (more on that in my next post), a slice-of-life game based on the idea of an R-map ’story machine’.

But what I really want to talk about is Left 4 Dead, the new zombie shooter from Valve.

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Oh. My. God.  Even if this weren’t the most thematically appropriate game for me to play on the planet, this would be one hell of an amazing game.  In case you’re not into PC gaming, Left 4 Dead uses a new technology from Valve called the ‘Director AI’ that assesses the health of you and your teammates and adjusts the location of enemies and resources throughout the map.  I’ve played through the first two maps of the game more than a few times using the demo, and every single play-through felt different.  L4D keeps you on the edge of your seat, waiting for the next flood of rage zombies to come crashing through a door; and when you’re absolutely ready, it lets loose some slack, presenting room after empty room that you keep bursting into, waiting for that next adrenaline-fueled wave of enemies.  I’m not sure how it does it, but when you actually do release your sphincter, you’re due for a dose of REALLY rough times.

On other run-throughs, my co-ops and I have been hit by multiple waves of zombies in the opening seconds of the game, reducing us to pulp.

My only real gripe with the game is that the four co-op characters are completely alike.  I understand the reasoning: Having the characters as specialists weakens the whole ‘we all need to make it to the end’ vibe of the game.  It becomes a matter of each specialist doing their niche thing instead of all the players doing their damn best at fending off the dead.  It takes a lot of grief out of the mix.

It’s also been fun to play online, where the Counter Strike mentality has gotten more than one player killed but good.  Charging ahead alone is the fastest way to get killed - as is lurking in the aft.  The Director will measure that distance and pounce on you.  Online play also taught me that ‘turtling’ - taking it slow and clearing the level methodically - is a bad idea.  Go too slow and you’ll run out of bullets before the game runs out of zombies.  You have pistols that have unlimited ammo, but unless you’re a headshot god (much harder in L4D because of the erratic way that the Infected move!), running out of ammo is a bad idea.

Which brings me to the visuals and sound: Really great.  Given that there are so many objects on the screen at any one time, the graphics aren’t next-gen, but I can crank all of the settings up on my dual-core machine  and get a great ride.  The Infected lurch, fight, slump and then burst at you in a full-on screaming rage.  Again, because of the pure number of polygons, the bodies disappear but the blood doesn’t - making any serious encounter look like a pipe bomb went off in a slaughterhouse.  Molotovs set the Infected on fire, but they run at you anyways, a la 28 Days Later.

All in all, the game has given me a lot of inspiration for working some additional material and changes into DEAD.  The very idea of a Director (embodied by the Dead player) and the Threat deck in DEAD as a character in its own right just got a big pat on the back.

And with 264 days left, who knows?

President-Elect Obama, in Chicago’s Grant Park:

Hello, Chicago.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.

A little bit earlier this evening, I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Sen. McCain.

Sen. McCain fought long and hard in this campaign. And he’s fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.

I congratulate him; I congratulate Gov. Palin for all that they’ve achieved. And I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation’s next first lady Michelle Obama.

Sasha and Malia I love you both more than you can imagine. And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.

And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother’s watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my sister Maya, my sister Alma, all my other brothers and sisters, thank you so much for all the support that you’ve given me. I am grateful to them.

And to my campaign manager, David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best — the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.

To my chief strategist David Axelrod who’s been a partner with me every step of the way.

To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.

It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory.

And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education.

There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.

In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those — to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves — if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

~

Yes, we can.  And yes, we did.

~

Nuclear Winter, by Owen Greene, Ian Percival & Irene Ridge (1985) - UK.

A delightful romp through firestorm modelling, environmental collapse and the likelihood of 82% mortality within the first year after a ‘measured’ exchange of nuclear weapons

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, by the Institute of Medicine (1986).

Winds near blast sites at the temperature of boiling water, second-degree burns within line-of-sight for ten miles, and sterility for everyone!

The Effects of Nuclear War, by the Office of Technology Assessment (1979).

The long-term effects are incalculable.

And I start to wonder if maybe I should make a game based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

We’re at 290 days to GenCon, and let’s be honest with ourselves, progress has been made, but most of it is invisible.  I’m currently working on a re-implementation of Ludolab.  What’s Ludolab?  Glad you asked.  My original concept was a game design collaboration site in which shares of the final product were doled out for art, design, etc.  I’ve talked with a few financially-savvy people (Thierry!) and they seem to think that it’s not feasible, mostly because labor is not fungible - you can’t quantize labor on a project like a game in any easy way.  

So instead I’ve taken it underground - I’m creating a platform for prototyping my own games (DEAD and AFTER being the main projects at the beginning), using Ruby on Rails and some Javascript magic.  It’s been going swimmingly, at least until I’ve hit a wall with some of the logic.

So why waste time on this?  Three reasons: 1. Create a means of making cards and managing the economy of DEAD in a programmatic way - this seems necssary.  2.  Create a means of creating later games faster.  3.  I can always scale up the site to include other people’s projects for a nominal fee.  4. I can package up the entire platform for sale.

That’s 4 reasons.  Anyways.

So what I’m doing is putting out the word to people who either are Ruby (or Rails) wizards, or who want to learn alongside: If you’d like to pitch in with me, send me an e-mail at brian.hollenbeck#gmail.com.  Make substitutions as necessary.

I’ve added a ‘Mix-O-Tronic of the Moment’ bar below the first post on the blog.  Now you can get a solid-gold game idea with every refresh of the page.  So read early, read often.

Also, I’ve gone with an understated dervish theme!

In this post, Jonathan Walton asks “System Matters + Lumpley Principle = ?’.  At ‘Story by the Throat’, a blog name that I personally covet, Joel considers the differences between RPGs and what his friend Willem is doing with his own blogject, the College of Mythic Cartography.  Both posts consider the same subject: what is the boundary between structured play in RPGs and the unstructured ‘other stuff’ - either the happenings at the table in the Lumpley Principle, or in an activity such as story-jamming.

The answer to my mind is quite simple: with any activity of this kind, there are formal and informal systems.  The formal system in RPGs is the rule systems.  They define what is part of ‘the game’ - the exchanges of currency that can be made, and the channels that the players can operate in. 

Of course, the players also operate in one or more informal systems - social networks, interpersonal dynamics, gaming culture and the like - which have their own sets of rules and operations.  A classic examples of the informal systems at the table are the Girlfriend Effect, where the main squeeze of the GM gets special consideration for his or her character.  A more positive example is when I let my 5 year-old daughter know that there’s a better move that she can take in checkers.

With this in mind, story-jamming simply moves the formal systems surrounding story creation that are in place in most RPGs and places them inside the bounds of the informal social systems of the group doing the jamming.  The players do what feels right, and there’s no resistance from more formal systems of interaction - the game isn’t telling them what to do.  To varying degrees, the ‘classic’ RPG player wants that resistance.  They want the game to push back, to confine their actions.  Working within the bounds of that resistance makes the game interesting - the idea that you I can say ‘BANG’ and you can’t say ‘NUH UH’ - or rather, that you can say ‘NUH UH’, but you have to have the rules backing you up as well.

Various attempts over the years have been made to introduce formal structure to the informal areas of gaming, and vice-versa.  I would call any explicit Social Contract an attempt to introduce formality to the informal system around the game table.  Primetime Adventures codifies things like ‘everyone agreeing what the show is going to be about’ - that sort of explicit agreement is a formal structure inside the fuzziness of informal table gatherings.

While I have no problem with the abstraction of game rules to fit in with a given social situation (Willem’s friends want to story-jam, not to do something kinda like story-jamming), I don’t agree with the imposition of formal structures into the social realm of games.  At best, I think that games designs should function well regardless of the social structure of the participants - imagine the rules of chess falling apart because the two players didn’t like each other.  A game should contain enough formal structure to insulate play from egregious social dysfunction - at least to the point where play is still possible.  If everyone walks away from the table, that’s another situation entirely.

A lot of the ideas that I’ve been playing around with: DEAD, AFTER and Cold War being the three that stand out, revolve around the idea that complete harmony at the table is all fine and dandy, but it’s not what makes a game interesting.  What’s interesting is having your best friends around the table and gleefully backstabbing them for the sake of a good story - which is the only shared endgame that everyone at the table shares.

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As a postscript, the AGE Model takes all of this formal/informal stuff in stride.  The Gamespace is the home of the formal systems set up by the rules.  The Playspace is where the messy social stuff happens.  Interaction between the two spaces is the same idea covered by the Lumpley Principle, and taken together, and the two spaces taken as a whole, with all of their interconnections, is the answer to the equation ‘System Matters + Lumpley Principle’.  Call it the Fuzzyformal System, or something even more clever.

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Required viewing: The Day After, from ABC, 1983.  Threads, from the BBC, 1985.

I watched The Day After in when it aired in 1983 - I was required to do so for Mr. Felt’s 8th grade Geography class.  Mr. Felt was a Cold Warrior to the bone.  We spent a great deal of time in the class on the geopolitics of the current world - I think that actual geography accounted for about a week’s worth of Mr. Felt’s class.  I learned more about detente and Henry Kissinger than the average 13 year-old boy is usually willing to absorb.  8th grade was also an impressionable time for me.  It was one of the darkest years of my life, and the time when my interest in gaming was turned up to 11 (this wasn’t really a coincidence).  The two factors conflated to create a very palpable sense of dread about the coming nuclear apocalypse.

Now I’m turning all of that into a game, using the Cairn system.  The main mechanical conceit of the game is that all of the resources available to the players in the game are toxic.  Chips from the cards (I’m hoping to get translucent, poison-green ones) are necessary for the characters to survive, but if you hold onto them, they represent exposure to radiation (Rads); sit on a pile of resources and you progress very quickly through radiation sickness, and death is close behind.

All of the other traits in the game are expressed in negative terms: Cruelty, Hoarding, Violence.  The only means of survival is to somehow subtract from the group and put whatever it is in your own pocket.  This has its own negative social and mechanical consequences, of course.  So it’s a balance between the objective destruction of the environment and the horrors the characters subject one another to in the name of survival.

The site is now Chrome and Safari friendly, without the content column straying all over the map. The difference between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ - minor, but key in this case!

Here’s a meme I can get behind.  Wordle creates typographical art out of a document.  I fed in the AGE Model, and got this out:

Out of the blue, I won a free downloadable copy of SPORE, which I promptly did, testing my new cable bandwidth for all it was worth.  About two hours and one giant unzip operation later, I installed the game and sat down with my 5 year-old daughter to kick the tires.  I was not disappointed.  Graphically and audially, the game is a masterpiece - in the Cell and Creature stages, you can see far-off (or much larger, in the case of the Cell stage) creatures with distance blur.  The procedural environments are intoxicating and the gameplay is simple enough that my daughter was able to play out the Cell stage on her own after a couple of go-arounds.

The Creature stage is also a lot of fun - you slowly morph your creature to fit your play style, encountering new adversaries along the way, along with the occassional, tantalizing glimpse of the future.  I was shocked to see a UFO, the centerpiece of the Space part of the game, appear over my creature and slowly circle the area, sucking up one of my brethren and some enemies from a nearby nest.

I’ve completed only about half of the Tribal stage, and it’s been a lot of fun too.  Some people have made hay of the fact that your creature doesn’t change anymore.  Well no, it’s not supposed to.  The game changes gears from millions of years per evolution to hundreds or thousands - that’s not enough to show evolution.  But my creature, once I finalized the design at the end of the Creature phase, kept its attributes and inherent scores.  My Creature, the Etophore, is a sneak-charger: Sneak up on Sasquatch feet up to a lone enemy, then charge and finish him off with my claws.  The Etophore is a herbivore - the attacking is purely in defense.  After reading some reviews, I expected this behavior to vanish in the Tribal phase - until I sent a war party to a nearby village and the whole tribe went into Sneak mode and charged the opposing villagers, popping up out of nowhere - all on their own.  Beautiful.

Now to my quibbles with the game.

First of all, you have to collect all of the available parts for the Cell and Creature stages, meaning that as a herbivore, I was only going to find about a third of all the bits.  As a Carnivore, you can collect parts by killing and eating - herbivores have to find skeletons and kill Alphas of competing species.  It’s slow going.  In the Cell stage especially, herbivores are at a disadvantage in that they can only get bits from pieces of meteor (the game is based on panspermia!) - I only ever found a single one, leaving me to get almost none of the Cell parts for my next creation(s).  While it’s interesting to find a new bit and use it, the collectible factor leaves me a bit dry.

My second quibble is that ‘evolution’ is all in the hands of the player - it’s possible to completely alter your Creature from one evolution to the next - everything from body-shape to diet to number of limbs is completely alterable.  This undermines the Creature phase a bit, unless you put artificial restrictions on yourself (which I did/do, and my daughter didn’t/doesn’t).  The game should restrict the number of bits you change with each iteration, either as a limit to the number of parts added/subtracted or by introducing a DNA (i.e. currency) debt.  This debt is present in the Tribal stage, but not in the Creature or Cell stage.  Maybe a mod will introduce it.

Lastly, the implements in the Tribal stage aren’t alterable, unlike the bits from the last two stages and the various creators for vehicles and buildings in the Civ and Space stages.  This is a bit disappointing.  Again, maybe there will be an expansion that allows you to make implements that suit your tribe’s temperment.

The game works exactly like Wright said it would: By introducing the player to larger and larger scopes of action, it scaffolds you into play in a way that few games of this genre do.  At the same time, it’s not as heavily structured as a similar game like Black & White was.  By the time I reached the end of the Cell and Creature stages, I was ready for more - which the Tribal stage provides.  Your scope expands - not until the Tribal stage can you move the camera off of your creature.  By the time you’re at the stage, you’re more than capable of managing the extra complexities.

Spore is enough of a cipher that I’ve seen more than a dozen reviews of the game that have completely conflicting views of the same features: the open gameplay, the simplicity of the opening stages, etc.  I’ve read that the later stages become uncomfortably difficult - time will tell.

My wife, who is sainted beyond all recognition just for living with me, recently bought me a Nintendo Wii as my ‘back to school’ present.  I’m not going back to school, everyone else in my house is, but the wife wanted to make sure I was included in all of the money-burning fun.

I only have Wii Sports (and will only have Wii Sports for some time to come), but playing with it has totally opened my eyes, and reinforced a central notion of my thinking in game design: physicality matters with games.

I’ve played countless hours of baseball, boxing and bowling on the PC and elsewhere.  Not until I played with the Wii, however, was I so easily engrossed in the tasks at hand.  The force-feedback is one thing - that certainly helps.  But the use of the Wiimote as a bat, ball, or tennis racquet stimulates muscle memory and integrates the experience much more thoroughly for me.  I don’t think I’d have spent the time with Wii Sports that I have if it didn’t offer a much more compelling experience with the physical aspect - the games themselves are a bit short (3-inning baseball?!), but they scale up the difficulty nicely to the point where I really have to fight to win that damn 3-inning game, but my 5 year-old daughter can play and have fun at the same time.

So this has gotten me back to thinking about distributed play, and mechanical diversity.  If a simple game of tennis can be made much more rich with the Wii’s rather simple and intuitive change in mechanical play (from gamepad to Wiimote), the physical component of games we play is essential to our understanding of those games.  By changing the physical aspect (from a character sheet and dice, for example) to something more representative and correlary to the theme of the game, you can fundamentally change the way people play, without the need to impose extra rule structure to compensate.

I’ve decided to go ahead with creating a Distributed Play website and possible design competition to highlight these ideas - more on that later on in the week.

In less than a day, visits to my blog via Google Chrome have jumped past IE6/7, although they’re still way behind Firefox, natch.  I think that Google’s apps are way beyond slick (I do all my photo organization in Picasa, for example), but I’m reserving judgement on Chrome until I see how hackable people make it.  Firefox has a real edge with expandability, and I won’t sacrifice that for Chrome’s shininess.

However, since it’s in the same browser group as Safari, this blog’s a bit broken in it.  I’ll have a new CSS patch up for it as soon as I can figure out what’s wrong.  Me know nothing about Safari.

As I’m sitting here writing, I have the 3rd round table tennis live stream going on in the background.

That’s some world-class ping-pong going on.

So I’m an idiot and I thought that GenCon was this last weekend - a weekend that I actually spent playing a lot of strategy games (GMT’s Paths of Glory and Fantasy Flight’s Cold War, mainly), but not writing a whole lot.  I was sitting down to do the first serious work in about a week, lamenting my lost seven days, only to find out that GenCon is this coming weekend (the 15th of August), meaning that I got a reprieve of seven days, with three days left.

Official countdown total: 368 days left.

* * *

During this trip, I interviewed my opponent (shout-out to Mike Bellar!) and we talked about his perfect game.  The answer was a manageable tabletop 4x (explore, expand, exploit & exterminate), with two different boards: a strategic and a tactical.  We talked a bit about the obstacles to 4x on the tabletop, and here’s my AGE-Modelish take on the problem:

4x games suffer from two conflicting forces: Authenticity and Simplicity.  Play should carry enough verisimiltude that you feel that you’re making valid decisions in the gamespace you’re playing - a space-empire game should feel different from a business/stock market game.  The addition of authentic rulespaces, though, creates complexity and exceptions that clutter up the game play - to the extent that now two different people that I’ve interviewed that have worked on their own 4x-ish games have resorted to Excel spreadsheets to manage play.  (In the interest of full disclosure, past versions of both Merchant and Manor have required the aid of a computer to make them work - so I’m no saint in this matter.)

Streamlining the mechanics of the game, however, dissolves the authenticity - pushing chits around on a board that provides only marginal thematic feedback isn’t satisfying.  The chits could be crates of exotic spices, tons of dilithium or shares in Gizmonics Institute.  If the play doesn’t create the right “feel” then the experience is lost.

Balancing the two is, if not nigh impossible, at least grindingly difficult.  On thinking it over for the past few days, the conclusion that I’ve come to is this: choose the key aspects of the experience that separate it from other 4x experiences, and keep those aspects to a minimum.  For my merchant game, maybe it’s spoilage orf the cargo.  For the space game, a unique mode of travel.  Then tie those core mechanics together to create secondary layers of derived mechanics.

Derivation of mechanics means less to remember, and an easier flow to the game.  Secondarily, layers of information that would take up a spreadsheet can be represented in a few key stats, so long as the derivations are relatively straight-forward.  The derivations themselves can aid verisimilitude, so long as they conform to the player’s expectations.

An example: In a space exploration game, the population of a colony could be derived from the Habitability score of the planet added to the Tech level of the colony, that technology representing the ability of the colonizing power to alter the habitability.  The habitability could be a raw score on a card; the Tech level a stat that the player is already keeping track of.

Of course, where this runs into problems is with highly dynamic/volatile aspects - for example, the price of a company’s stock during the course of a business 4x.  Part of the solution, I think, comes from the use of multiple-derivatives.  The stock price could be dependent on trade volume (a stack of chips of two colors), the scale of the company (its ‘market cap’), and the actions of the current round of play.  This is where Cairn comes into play: with three mediums of information storage (chips, cards and a tracking sheet), these factors can all be presented simultaneously by chip color and number, location on the card, etc.

This is where 4x and complex wargames get it wrong - and where they’re starting to get it right.  Information is stored in the rules instead of right in front of the players - a multitude of exceptions instead of play structures that encourage following the same thought patterns.  In playing Paths of Glory, I was stunned by how the rule structures for Entrenchment and core mechanics simulated the plodding course of the war, and the rigidity of the fronts.  Despite endless attempts, both of us didn’t manage to budge the Western Front of the Great War more than a space in either direction.  Towards the end of our play time (we got through 1914 and a bit of 1915 in 4 hours, our time window), I decided to get bold, and I paid for it by winding up in a position where Germany was going to fall by 1916 at the latest.  WWI wasn’t about audacity, no matter what the posters said.  It was about grinding attrition and economic ruin for the win.

The other thing that GMT gets right in the game is the use of cards with multiple uses (this is similar to their Command & Colors system): you can use a card to order up replacements, advance the action, or as an event (say, phosphene gas attacks).  Deciding what to use each card for, and by placing mulitple forms of information on each card, they become much more versatile, and the game is deeper as a result.

This is distributed play at work - a wargame with cards plays out differently than a wargame with just the chits and dice.  Cairn is built on that philosophy.

It’s been a while since my last update, but that’s simply because I’ve had three complete upheavals in my life, albeit great ones:

1. The birth of my second daughter.
2. Moving to Chicago for my wife to start work as a professor, having finished her PhD.

This has left me in a very interesting position: With the wife making the bulk of the family bacon, so to speak, it’s left me with the option to pursue my creative agendas while taking care of the brood.  To whit: I am starting my Creative Year.  This is the year (officially, from GenCon Weekend ‘08 to GenCon Weekend ‘09) when I will finish a game and either have a fat stack of it to sell at GenCon ‘09, or have multiple advance copies (assuming that I publish third-party) to have play tables and create buzz at GenCon Indy ‘09.

This has both positive and negative connotations: It’s a great opportunity - but it is also my last, as far as I’m concerned.  If I can’t get it to work this year, I’m going to have to seriously reassess my commitment to being a game designer - to calling myself that.  If I can’t make it work in this year of relative freedom, then I don’t think I’m very well suited to the pursuit.  I may have the ideas.  I may have the desire, but I don’t have the will. This year is the test, and it begins today.

Here’s the run-down of this year’s activities, categorized.

PRIMARY GOALS

1. Finish DEAD, playtest and submit to publishers or self-publish in time for GenCon 09.
2. Develop and publish at least one, possibly two, small indie games as PDFs, also in time for GenCon 09, possibly sooner.  Top contenders at this point are: Eidolon and/or Oort.

SECONDARY GOALS

1. Expand my work as a freelancer designer and programmer, instead of working at a dead-end job.
2. Start the AGE Model podcast.
3. Start serious development work on Ludolab.

TERTIARY CONSIDERATIONS

1. Network at local universities for designing research posters.
2. Explore possible avenues of artistic expression.

So this, as they say, is it.  365 days from now, I’ll be wrapping up my first, and hopefully triumphant, pilgrimage to GenCon Indy.

Ready, set …