Tag Archives: game design

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Random Events Are Fun

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I’ve been playing a bit of GalCiv 2 lately (mostly when I want a quick break from BGT) and in the process I’m messing around with some of the component stats and techs to make it more fun for me. I’m trying to maintain the balance of course, and I’m running test games to see how it plays out. But that’s just the preface to why I was playing GalCiv 2; the real point of this post is what happened when I played GC2.

See, Stardock, who make the GalCiv games, are kind of trolls. They’re on record as saying that the percentage bonuses you are shown on-screen aren’t necessarily accurate; they don’t think such perfect knowledge is something the players should have. I don’t know exactly how large the variables are but it means that if you see something that gives you +5% morale, you might only really be getting +3%, or you might get +7%, and so on.

The other, even bigger trolly thing that they do in GC2 is with random events. Like most Strategy games there are random events of various kinds that are intended to shake things up a bit. Unlike those in, say, Civ, where you get a free promotion or one building in one city becomes more useful, the GC2 “Mega Events” can change the face of the entire galaxy. And Stardock have set it up specifically so that events will fire that cause the galaxy to descend into batshit insane chaos. Two big alliances at peace? Random event causes war. Everyone’s peaceful and not paying much attention to military? Dread Lords show up. Huge, draining war breaks out? Income is doubled. Or halved. Either way it’s pretty huge. These aren’t your daddy’s random events. For instance, last night whilst I was trying desperately to catch up with the Altarians, this happened:

Do not adjust your set.

This is a Class 46 world. For those of you who don’t know what that means, let me crib from Tom Francis’ excellent AAR at PC Gamer, when he found a Class 28 World;

Let me put a Class 28 planet in context. Earth is a class 8. Risa, from the Star Trek series, the pleasure planet? That would be about a 15. The Fantasy Planet in Futurama, where everyone’s wildest dreams come true? Maybe 18. If you go to Church every Sunday and serve God’s will in all you do, you’ll go to a Class 23 when you die. I’d never seen a Class 28. Until now.

Class 46. How did this happen? And the astute may notice it’s surrounded by other, habitable worlds. It’s rare for so many to be so clustered. What happened? What happened was the same insane random event happened twice. This event improves the Class of every uninhabited world by 12 within a certain radius. It happened twice, in two adjacent sectors. The first time it happened I was agog and immediately switched to Full Colony Mode to grab the 20-odd worlds that just went from Class 0 (Uninhabitable) to Class 12/13-ish (I was running with some very strong Planet Quality bonuses as well, which compounded all this further). It also boosted already-habitable worlds, so a Class 9 that had been of moderate priority jumped up to Class 21. And because so many of the worlds remained unsettled between the two firings of the event, a lot of worlds went from Class 0 to Class 12, then to Class 23 or so.

But that world, the Class 46, Nesro III? Well you can see it’s “Uninhabitable” and has a little symbol beside it. You need a particular tech – in this case Barren World Colonization – to actually settle it. These techs are research intensive, but the worlds tend to be of particular quality. This here world, Nesro III, must have been about a Class 22 or so to begin with. Very much worth pursuing under most circumstances, and potentially worth teching towards all by itself. Nobody could claim it because the tech was still some time away. The event fired twice, and it got up to this.

And that, fillies and gentlecolts, is how you do random events. Take note other strategy game designers! And readers, tell us about your experiences where stuff like this resulted in, shall we say, extreme outcomes!

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Patronage and endowments.

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Something interesting has occurred to me. I was thinking about how other creative/entertainment sectors will very often have people who do things because they want to, rather than because it’s what the market demands. Now this may seem like a senseless statement but I can assure you, even if you’re trying to stick to your guns on every last syllable, when you’re writing a book you still have “Who will this appeal to?” “Will this drive people away from future books?” and the like in the back of your mind. Well, I do at least. Even with something I can completely control like that, there are such concerns. Even so there are always people out there who are happy to use their success to make something they really want to make, be it a movie or a TV show or whatever, even if it’s not going to be a major blockbuster. Similarly, we have all kinds of patrons for the more revered older arts, donations to save a statue or to support a poet or the like. But do we have the same for games?

Well I suppose the short answer is “Yes.” but that wouldn’t make for very satisfactory analysis, tempting as it is to leave it here and abscond to New Antioch where I am trying to craft a brutal urban wasteland from which the poors and minorities have no escape.

Okay, blog's over. Job well done! Time for donuts.

We do have, for instance, the indie game scene, where things like Dwarf Fortress and Aurora are superb examples – the former is funded by donations alone and the latter doesn’t even accept those because Walmsley’s independently wealthy. Toady has pretty explicitly said that while he takes player thoughts into consideration he’s making a game that he and Threetoe want to make, and if other people want to play it and support it that’s great, but if they don’t they’re not going to make radical changes to the game in order to appeal.

Similarly there are people of particular renown who have some leeway even in major companies. I imagine that if, say, Shiggy says “Making a game.”, Nintendo will pretty much let him do that. And we know there are people like Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Peter Molyneux who have had in the past a huge amount of discretion in what they make. But these times seem to be lost now.

In essence I’m just wondering – what if some really rich dude comes along, gathers up a bunch of programmers, and says “We’re making the best space 4X game ever. It’s going to be compared positively to MOO2. We will do what we think is best for the gameplay, not for sales. Profits and sales are secondary to the main objective.” Not indie, but real big-budget, triple-A stuff. I tell you what, when I am mega rich and rule large tracts of the universe, I’m going to make sure some great vidya gets made. But in the meantime I wonder if we might not benefit from a greater spirit of philanthropy towards games in this manner, and help spur new innovations and experimentation.

Edit: Unrelated, but something everyone should read. I think this is one of the most important articles currently on the Internet regarding gaming, it touches a lot of points about a vital game and company.

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Evolving ethics

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Here’s a thing that bugs me about videogames that take place over a long period of time; They run on the assumption that what held true in our world will hold true in that way. Absolute monarchy and aristocracy begin, and these are gradually or violently reduced in favor of either constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Divine Right gives way to consent of the governed. Religion begins as a dominant force for the entire planet, and gradually declines in importance. It’s true that most games allow you through some means or other to maintain your previous status quo, but the assumptions are always the same – later technologies unlock new governments and these are superior to previous ones. You can run a theocratic state in Civ but if your rivals are a police state or democracy, they’re likely to outproduce you by some measure due to the bonuses they get compared to yours.

Now, in the first instance, I understand that even making these value judgments can be a pretty tricky task if you’re making a game which offers a number of governmental forms, and every single thing you add to that can complicate it considerably. Let’s take Communism as a working example. Superficially it’s easy to see why a Communist state would get a bonus to industry – Stalin forced the USSR from peasant serfdom to industrial superpower within a couple of decades, and Mao attempted the same in China (Though it was Deng Xiaoping’s free-market oriented reforms which have unleashed the Middle Kingdom’s current surge in wealth). Hoxha’s Albania and the DPRK regime both put military production before any other consideration. Our real-world historical examples of it are industry-centered, militaristic, and vary from merely autocratic to incomparably vicious.

If it was like this, we'd all be Red.

The question is, does this demonstrate what Communism has to be? Or is this how it is perceived because that’s how it worked out in our world? I would argue no, that much as I am opposed to it as a system, it wasn’t a fait accompli that it would turn out as it did. Had it taken hold in a heavily industrialized country such as the UK, France, Germany, or the USA, had the Mensheviks taken power in 1917, had the CNT-FAI won in Spain and resisted Stalinist control, we might well have a very different image of what Communism is.

My point isn’t to defend Communism. I’m merely using it because it’s an excellent example for what I am talking about, which is that game makers rely overly on preconceptions rooted in our reality’s experience to inform them of how things work in their games. More interesting, I feel, would be a more gradual, evolving system, where you didn’t choose your form of government so much as evolve it over the course of the game by reacting to events and conditions. The closest example to this I am aware of is Victoria II, where different political groups have various objectives, and different ones are allowed to do different things (So the reds can build factories all over the place, whilst radical liberals can’t fund any, for example) but even so, it feels somewhat thin, perhaps because it takes place over a relatively short time period.

I would, in any event, love to see a game on the timescale of Civ or even Spore where the development of not only your country, but its ideologies and most of all, what those ideologies actually entail, changes over the course of the game. For another example, consider that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment it was argued by many (very pious) people that to understand the universe in a scientific manner was not only in accordance with being a good Christian, but indeed a form of worship in itself. The argument (Grossly oversimplified; I’m no theologian) was that as God had created everything, everything was holy, and thus understanding anything had to be an act of worship in itself. What if such a perspective had taken hold even more strongly and become as universal an attitude towards Christianity as the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross? I doubt the current perspective that religion is dogmatic and myopic whilst secularism is the route to a more accurate understanding of the world would be as deeply entrenched by any means.

So yes, what I'm saying is that no current game is spergy enough for me.

The problem is, of course, that this is an immensely complicated field. Even working on the experiences of our actual history, we have a huge amount of different experiences to draw on. When you implement “Democracy” in Civilization, is it the democracy of Athens? Is it a democracy where only the landed elite can vote? Is it constrained by constitutional checks and balances? How do you model a unicameral vs. a bicameral system? Is the President the Head of State only (As in the Irish Republic) or the Head of State and Head of Government, as in the USA? And what influence does this have on how the respective countries are run? These are all just individual factors of a single potential form of government. How they all interact, how they might all evolve over the course of centuries, is certainly a daunting thing to tackle in even the densest academic text, nevermind a videogame.

But ultimately, isn’t that what more ponderous strategy games are about? You’re not just drawing your lines on the map, you’re creating a country, wrestling with competing concerns, trying to do five things with the resources to do three of them properly, listening to the concerns of different groups in your society and deciding how to react? I admit it might be something of a niche game, but I think there would be room for something that really went into the evolution of political systems, religions, and social ideas in videogames.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Why Hearts of Iron could be better.

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Fair warning: This post is going to deal with some unpleasant issues, such as the Holocaust, concentration camps, and so forth.

I’ve been playing plenty of Hearts of Iron 2 over the years, and as my last post said, I’ve been spending time with Darkest Hour over the weekend. It’s a lot of fun! And yet I am constantly reminded of what I regard as a significant shortfall in the game – the absence of atrocities. From Paradox’s own forum: Short version is No Anything Nasty, No Talking about why there’s Nothing Nasty.

Now, if you are hesitant, I can understand where you are coming from. Videogames are not exactly renowned as an especially thoughtful medium, certainly not one which is ready to tackle weighty issues like the most horrific crimes in human history. As an aside, I would question how they ever can become that if we don’t start taking some faltering steps in that direction. Nonetheless if there is hesitation or concern I am, as I say, understanding of this sentiment. We are the medium of grisly chainsaw deaths, where a gunshot to the gonads is rewarded with an amusing animation and as often as not some sort of bonus, a medium where very few games even conceive of avoiding violence, let alone using non-violence as a primary arbiter of solving problems.

And you thought it'd be a screenshot of Madworld or Gears of War!

So yes, I can see where the concern would come from. I have concerns myself. I’m not confident that too many developers could do something as unpleasant as World War 2, the real unpleasantness of it I mean, in a way that is anything other than an appeal to prurient sadism or rubbernecking. And, let’s be honest here, in other games how many of us really have acted like genocidal maniacs in games where it’s possible? I’ve blown up stars because it’s easier to do that than to mount a regular invasion of a solar system. When abstracted -or when not based in recent historical events – players are given leeway to commit acts so overwhelmingly evil that the inhabitants of the 40K Universe would balk. Allowing the player to engage in such actions will mean players engage in such actions.

But here’s the thing: Hearts of Iron deals with a very specific period of history, involving very specific actors, whose choices had wide-ranging effects. Nazi Germany was not a fighting power who happened to devote some effort to exterminating millions because it sounded like a good idea at the time – it was a core ideological conceit of the state and it had a significant impact on their conduct of the war effort itself. However insane their policies, however divorced from reality, they nevertheless existed and were consequential. When things began to go badly on the Eastern Front for the Third Reich, they still devoted an enormous effort of industry and infrastructure to the extermination of ‘untermenschen’. They shipped tools and talent to the camps rather than to the front. Imagine a Germany where antisemitism never escalated beyond the norm of 1930s Europe. The Jewish scientists never fled to England and America, and suddenly the Nazi regime didn’t kill or exile all the people responsible for developing the atomic bomb.

My point is this: You cannot separate World War Two from its atrocities. Well, you can if you have a narrow-focus view. An FPS through Operation Overlord isn’t going to turn up too much of the truly nasty stuff, because the truly nasty stuff wasn’t happening in Northern France, and that is a completely fair choice for developers to make. But a grand strategy game which avoids doing it is capitulating, both in terms of not including something vital for understanding what the war was and factors which influenced how it played out, but because it ends up making the Nazis (and the Empire of Japan) seem like, well, a bunch of invading Germans (Or Japanese). They are militaristic, nothing more, and nothing within the game indicates that they are functionally different from anyone else. I believe that this approach actually whitewashes the Nazis to some extent because it divorces them from their gravest crimes, which were far worse than simply waging wars.

Will Wright presents: The Holocaust

In Paradox’s defense, there are European governments who would pitch a hysterical fit about a game where you could click a little button that said “Exterminate the Jews” or you got a big spreadsheet of undesirable elements and could choose whether to exterminate, sterilize, herd in ghettos, levy additional taxes, and so on. Additionally you can drop nukes on people, and that certainly does have an effect on manpower, indirectly suggesting massive deaths. As I’ve said myself I’m not sure such a thing could be done in entirely good taste and, even if it was, many players would most probably approach it with less than noble intentions themselves. Nonetheless I feel it is even more tasteless to act as though it never happened, and that it is detrimental to anything attempting to simulate WW2 on a grand scale.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Put the cat among the AIs.

Er, or the pigeons. Anyway. What I’m going to talk about in this post is something I expect will be a common theme for me because I find it rather fascinating. That is to say, how AIs act when direct human intervention is absent or minimized.

I’m not quite sure why this is, but I am fascinated by – have always been fascinated by – watching a game do its thing with a minimum of intervention on my part. I suppose this is something that many people do enjoy, given the success of The Sims franchise, but for me it extends into almost any genre you can think of. If there are AIs, I will want to watch them do their thing without me being involved, or watch them reacting to some particularly huge event I set in motion and then retreat from the scene, like some kind of nuke-delivering playwright.

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with nukes

Here’s the thing: I know what the computer can do to me, generally speaking. I can figure out how it works and unless I set myself particular conditions (Which I admit I usually have trouble sticking to) I can exploit the AI’s inevitable weaknesses. When it’s AI against AI, I can oftentimes see a more level playing field which is consequently quite enjoyable to watch.

Sometimes though, it goes in a stranger direction still. Take Populous: The Beginning. Now, when I play that game, I really get into it. And when I visit disasters on a rival I really like to watch how they deal with it. I very commonly storm in, wipe out everything except any critical buildings and a couple of builders, then retreat and watch them rebuild. I do the same in various other strategy and RTS games. I love watching an AI country/state/tribe/etc. put itself back together, deal with the hardship I have inflicted. Now, I’ll concede, to some extent there is a streak of vicious sadism here. I flat out enjoy knowing that their puny civilization exists at my indulgence. But still, I enjoy watching it work as a system, as an ‘intelligence’ of whatever sort as well as a group of little computer people, a simulated society (However crude these simulations may be at this point notwithstanding).

With broader applications I think systems like this can be very powerful for immersion and enjoyment in games. Though I think GTAIV was a somewhat flawed game, the way it drew you into the world – in large part reliant on building a convincing city to inhabit – was quite astounding and unmatched. I guess what it boils down to is: Watching stuff happen without player involvement can be a critical thing in immersing the player. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when a game comes out where you are just one actor among many. Not in the MMO sense so much as… imagine Dynasty Warriors. Now imagine you’re a regular soldier on the battlefield, or at least the other generals and such run around as actively as you do. Conventional game design wisdom places the player as the primary actor, but also makes the player’s character the primary actor in-universe, and often enough the only one who has agency of any meaningful sort. I don’t agree entirely with this wisdom – I think being part of a larger system could not only serve as a strong method of immersion, but would also make the things the player does control that much more tangible and meaningful.