Raph Koster's Blog, page 7

Mailbag: Action Combat

I was recently rereading your piece Designing a Living Society in SWG (part two) https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/22/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-two/

And I became curious. You said that you made SWG an RPG because it had a much better retention than FPS games. Which, especially given the tech back then, seems to be a sensible position to take.

But I’m curious, if you were going to make SWG today’s gaming climate, with seemingly every MMO moving to action combat, would you still make it an RPG? A hybrid? A full blown FPS?

Obviously that decision would inform nearly everything else in design, but mostly I was trying to think how a class system would even work in a FPS centric SWG. It seems like there would be a lot less room to play around with abilities and specializations. Most people expect their shots to hit what they aim, so “to hit” chance isn’t really a thing to play around with. And I feel like there’s more expectation to have most guns, from the junk pistols to super expensive/hard to unlock, to do damage that’s in the ballpark of one another.

So all the abilities that you unlock would be less dependent on weapons, right? More oriented around giving the player more skills to do things, and maybe work up to some crazy, but limited, weapons? And I suppose you could still unlock special shots that do more damage, or pin people, or poison them.

I’m sorry if this is such a vague question that nearly answers itself, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to try to get some insight into someone who is working in the industry. It seems like a sci-fi MMO would be a harder thing to pull off these days.

–Brian Ward

I’d do it with action combat, for the following reasons which boil down now to “because I actually can now”:

The audience is larger. Back when RPGs always trumped FPSes on retention, that was an issue because it meant that the audience you had left paying you monthly was too small to sustain the costs of live operation and recouping development costs. That’s no longer the case. Online FPSes can acquire huge audiences now, which means you can probably make back your investment and turn a profit.
Technology is way better now. At the time we did Star Wars Galaxies, there was exactly one persistent world large-scale game with FPS-style combat: Neocron. It didn’t do anything like the large-scale battles that we would need for Star Wars. Sony Online in fact pioneered that technology, but on a different project, Planetside. But it was still in early development at the time that we had to make this decision.
Players have built up expectations of gameplay for different affordances and simulations. And there are few few turn-based or timer-based models out there for guns. Virtually none in first-person environments. It would feel pretty alien to the average player to be in first person and not have FPS combat. This was one of the things that drove having overhead views in SWG.

Of course, using real-world skill as the basic premise of play undermines the RPG element in general. Role-playing games are about playing a role, and a big part of playing a role is being someone you cannot be. That means not relying on real world skill as much, or rather relying on a particular universal set of skills mostly based around being persistent.

You can totally affect real world aiming skill with an RPG skill system though. The original design for SWG featured a “cone of fire” system which basically affected shot precision based on your skill level. Skills certifying you for different weapon types would also work fine (“you aren’t trained on this model blaster, you’re not used to the kick, you can’t actually use it effectively”). There are other ways. Some of these ways will play better with the Star Wars universe, some won’t (the certification thing, not so much, though maybe one could argue no Stormtroopers seemed to have gotten Blaster 1).

If you’re freed of the Star Wars setting, then certs work even better — a pistol with a thumbprint scanner saying “sorry, you’re not authorized to fire this weapon because you haven’t paid your dues to the Smuggler’s Guild” is fictionally plausible in any number of sci fi universes. “You don’t have the nano interface for this plasma rifle.” “You haven’t been trained in the telekinetic arts enough to activate the Focusing Lens.” Whatever. I might approach cone of fire as an assistive mechanism in that case, making it give magical aim boosts to people with lousy aim, because again, RPGs are about the fantasy of having a skill you don’t actually have.

The Internet as existential threat

Some days I wonder if we are completely screwed. So today’s post is a perhaps slightly hysterical outburst.

The news is not paying enough attention to the Petya/NotPetya ransomware, and the effects it is having on the Ukraine and on a bunch of businesses worldwide. I think it may be a harbinger of how the Internet could kill us all.

Based on what little I have read so far… A piece of widely used tax software — one used by the Ukrainian government — did its usual “phone home” to check for updates. Instead of getting back a few hundred bytes of acknowledgement, it got a viral payload. Basically, this tax software served as a means of auto-updating the virus to thousands of targets. The result is not just accounting systems down, though. It’s gas stations and point of sale systems in grocery stores.

This kind of thing basically makes me wonder how long we’ll have the Internet.

The whole premise of the Internet is the connecting of disparate networks. It started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. It truly is “Inter” now.

As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.

Think of a house with an alarm system on the doors, and a phone system, and power coming into the house, and water pipes, and so on. In your house these are probably all separate connections to separate networks. If the water stops running, you don’t tend to think that your phone will go down too. But you know that cutting the power at the mains renders the house vulnerable in a host of ways, because so many things do connect to the electricity.

Well, even without going so far as to buy Internet-enabled juicers, quite a lot of that stuff actually has been connected to one point of failure, and it’s not necessarily all things we term “critical infrastructure.”

What we are building is basically a perfect scenario for collapse, where a commons is consumed by actors who either don’t care or don’t understand the collective damage that is possible in a connected system, and the tipping points that can ensue.

Most networks we come across in the real world follow power-law distributions, and are what we term “scale-free networks.” Basically, this is where most nodes on the network aren’t that important, but there’s a preferential attachment thing going on, where some nodes are super-connectors. They’re really hard to destroy; you have to take out the biggest nodes, all at once. But if a power-law network is co-opted, you have a real problem. The Internet is basically our biggest node now.

Most of the big virus scares lately have been traced in one way or another back to state actors; Petya is based on an exploit the NSA kept secret, that was then leaked to the general public, and weaponized by hackers. As huge as their effects have been, consider that this implies fairly limited use. But picture a world where these tools of state actors are actually in the hands of random people, and released at the frequencies that random people would engage in. I remember being in South Korea in the mid-2000s, and watching a colleague’s laptop get owned instantly just from connecting to hotel wifi without firewalls up. Within ten seconds, the laptop was completely useless, locked up, conquered totally. Picture an Internet like that. In such a world, the only people who can connect would be the ones with the wherewithal to do so, the money and the savvy and the ability to actually harden security.

But just as critically, governments and state actors seem to be the source of so many of the problems precisely because the Internet is now too many forms of critical infrastructure, and therefore too juicy a target. If software eats everything, then the ability to kill software is the ability to kill anything. Net connectivity becomes the single point of failure for every system connected to it.

Even if the Net itself is designed to route around damage, that doesn’t help if it is the single vector of attack that can take down any given target. It’s too juicy a target for the military, too juicy a target for terror, too juicy a target for criminal ransom.

The old adage goes “when they came for this, I said nothing. When they came for that…” — we all know it. Consider that the more we hand gleefully over to the cloud because we want convenience, big data, personalization, and on, we’re creating a single thing that can be taken from us in an instant. We’ve decided to subscribe to everything, instead of owning it. When they came for your MP3s, your DVDs, fine,. not “critical infrastructure.” When they came for your resumes, OK, getting closer.

Your juicers? Whatever, we can laugh at that because it seems ludicrous, but it’s not. A typical US city only has three days of food within the city limits, because the Internet has enabled just-in-time delivery of foodstuffs. Economic optimization within a network tends to imply specialization, which means that even those lovely rural communities that in theory grow their own food don’t grow balanced diets locally. And you’re laughing at an Internet connected juicer? Your juicer is already Internet-connected. If that goes down, you don’t get any more juice! It’s just connected in a way you can’t see.

Now that gas stations play video ads on a loop above the station, now that every cash register is replaced with an Internet-connected device, losing Internet means no gas and no groceries. No gas means no trucks delivering the groceries. Especially if we make them into self-driving trucks! We think of critical infrastructure in terms of government-owned or controlled utilities… but the food trucking fleet is “critical infrastructure.” It’s owned by a massive patchwork of private entities, and actually is networked into the air fleet and the shipping fleet as well via databases of shipping container IDs. Wanna paralyze the world economy? Corrupt that ID database.

If you have a “smart wifi lightbulb” that’s critical infrastructure because it can be owned by a botnet and used to attack. Hyperbolic? In a world where we take actual damage when something digital is attacked, any CPU is basically a weapon, and leaving Internet connected CPUs unattended is basically leaving armory doors open.

Take the example of the solar panels on my home. They are similar to the IoT lightbulb, but the point is more pertinent.

The solar system controller phones home in a variety of ways to provide information to me on how it is performing, but also to inform the grid about the power I am generating . Because there is no battery in my home, any excess power beyond my consumption must be fed back to the grid. Should solar panels feed more power into the grid than the grid can actually handle, this power must be offloaded elsewhere — typically California pays neighboring states to take it. If the power utilities failed to do so, the grid would actually explode. Literally. Explode. The result could be a cascading power failure covering several states.

By connecting this solar controller to the Internet, we have actually put a portion of the critical infrastructure of the entire power grid in the cloud where it is vulnerable. Is that the most direct vector of attack? No, of course not. I suspect you can’t actually tell my solar controller to do anything much, it’s pretty stupid as smart devices go. But I have every expectation that someone wants to make direct bidirectional control possible, because it’s “cool.” (Presumably, regulation is stopping them. Yay, regulation. Please don’t let Congress notice your existence).

The only difference between my solar panels and a hydroelectric dam is scale. To the grid, they are all just nodes, with differing power outputs. Yes, you could cut off my panel. You could cut off a hydroelectric plant too. The issue isn’t whether the node in the network is severable. The issue is whether we are increasing the fragility of the system and thereby increasing the likelihood of cascade effects.

Network connecting solar panels opens the possibility of things like malware attacks designed to cause them all to misreport, say… luckily, the electrical grid has redundancies, fuses, switches. Physical lines to sever. We can measure power flows independent of using the Internet. So let’s consider another example.

Our medical systems have terrible Internet security… MRI machines you can connect to with USB that still have “admin:password” to gain root access. That’s horrifying, sure, but that’s not an attack at scale. More frightening: we’re busily uploading all our medical records to the cloud. Take down that cloud, and no patients can be treated, because nobody will know what they have, what meds they are on. Software swallows your insulin pumps and your pacemakers. To kill people, all you need is to hack that database, or simply erase it or block access to it. After all, we don’t tend to realize that in an Internet of Things, humans are just Things too.

As this software monster has encroached on stuff like election systems, the common reaction has been to go back to paper. So let’s consider a less obvious example. We should be going back to paper for our libraries too! We’ve outsourced so much of our knowledge to digital that the amount of knowledge available in analog has dropped notably. There are less librarians in the fewer libraries with smaller collections than there used to be. If the net goes down, how much reference material is simply not accessible that was thirty years ago? Google Search is “critical cultural infrastructure.” How much redundancy do we actually have? Could a disconnected town actually educate its children?

How critical is Google as a whole? If Google went down for a month, I am pretty sure we would see worldwide economic collapse. How much of the world economy passes through Google hosting? How much of it is in GMail? How much is dependent on Google Search, Google Images, Google Docs? The answer is a LOT. And because financial systems are now also JIT, ten thousand corporate blips where real estate agencies and local car washes and a huge pile of software companies and a gaggle of universities and so on are suddenly 100% unable to function digitally (no payroll! no insurance verification!) would absolutely have ripple effects into their suppliers and their customers, and thence to the worldwide economic market. Because interconnection without redundancy increases odds of cascades.

It’s actually NORMAL for complex systems to go through collapse cascades. It is part of how they grow and develop. We just won’t like it when one happens to us.

In the current economic climate, there’s this romance with the idea of monopoly. VCs like Peter Thiel speak approvingly of not funding anything unless it has a shot at monopoly. Some great achievements of technology probably wouldn’t have happened without the monopolies that are currently enjoyed by most of the big names in tech. The usual arguments against monopolies are generally around how they stifle competition and hurt consumers. Consumers are OK with the tech monopolies because they largely see benefits right now.

But the single biggest downside to these monopolies is actually lack of redundancy. If AWS went down for longer than the brief interval it did a while back, is there even enough capacity elsewhere? I have no idea — probably there is — but what happens when instead of it being a minor inconvenience it’s actually gone? That’s more like losing the hydroelectric dam than losing the solar panel.

We should be thinking now about how we create redundancy, resilience, in all these systems. “The cloud” isn’t it. Big Data isn’t what we need. Small replicated data is.

This is not solely a technological problem. I’ve often wanted to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and argue with him about Facebook. It is premised on the notion that “connecting everyone” is an unmitigated good. But it’s not, and for the exact same reasons as the above. We don’t have opinions, we share the opinions of those we know. We think and decide things like politics via viral mechanisms — the old school meaning of “meme.” Nodes can be infected, can even be high-profile nodes, and they will have cascading effects on far larger populations. Actors who don’t understand what they’re doing — like say, billionaire political activists — can basically release ideological malware into the population not realizing the cascade effects, because predicting chaotic systems is hard, and by connecting everyone we’re actually intentionally removing the firewalls and the fuses and the airlocks. Attacks on the idea of the value of expertise are like taking down the immune system while giving the patient a cold.

Right now, we’ve got shit in the water supply.

It’s possible the water gets so dirty that no one can drink from it anymore. This would be all of us saying the net is too dangerous to connect to.

It’s possible we all keep guzzling away and all die.

Or maybe we can start getting smart and diversifying our water supply, getting smarter about cross-contamination, drill separate wells and avoid tapping the same water table.

This sort of problem is what birthed modern epidemiology, long ago, when Dr. Snow figured out a cholera epidemic’s source in London. Facebook is like all of us drinking from the same well.

In general, I’ve come to believe that the norm for systems is to interconnect, to form larger networks, and for sub-areas in that network to evolve into specialization. In the process, they lose autonomy. Eventually, they end up as appendages — sometimes vital, sometimes optional — to the larger organism. The larger network is almost certainly more powerful, more likely to survive, capable of greater things. But when it goes, everything in it goes too. Bits and bobs survive, or dissolve back into constituent parts. Anything over-specialized at that point is almost certainly going to perish, to be used as building blocks for a different network.

We’re fine with this when we are the larger network. Paring our fingernails is no big deal, and the fingernails don’t get a vote. When we are in the larger network, though… it’s likely to our individual benefit not to permit it to reach too high a level of interconnection, specialization and sophistication. It simply means we’re each more vulnerable to the failure of some strongly interconnected node way up the line — just like the tendon in our toe is screwed if our nervous system gets shut down.

Anyway. Pay attention to Petya. Think about how much of your life is online. Assume every connected service will some day shutter. Consider your personal strategies, and contemplate the larger scale. I’m not a radical individualist, not by a long shot… not the sort to say we should hoard gold and have self-sufficient farms in our back yards. But I am someone who more than once has built entire complex communities with hundreds of thousands of nodes — technological and human nodes — and watched them fall prey to single points of failure.

This isn’t about cute Internet of Shit jokes anymore. It’s about how gangrene spreads.

The best posts of the last five years

Five years ago, I was asked to put together a list of the best articles on the website. I did, and it’s been linked as “recommended posts” up on the menu under the Blog section for a few years now.

Just the other day, I was asked by Jordan Amaro (@JordanAMAR0) whether I was ever going to update it. Probably at some point, but in the meantime here’s a list of the ones I think are best from the last five years.

Looking over the list, the things that jump out at me are: a lot more posts about the game business and trends, about general topics like creativity, and about the intersection of the virtual with the real — the way tropes from online worlds are impinging upon our daily lives. I also note quite a lot of looking backward in these: game histories, postmortems, etc. Of course, this was also the period that encompassed the Great Formalism Wars of 2012, which seem overblown given hindsight. And lastly… despite my feeling I am hardly posting anything, this is a pretty nice list for five years!

General game design

These are talks or posts about general game design topics: history of games, systems design advice, that sort of thing.

Do auction houses suck? 
Gritty Systems Design for Retention (talk)
Ten Years of World of Warcraft
Game design vs UX design
Social games vs gambling
What makes a game last a generation?
Dishonest opponents
Balancing novices and experts
GDC FlashBackward (talk)
Abstract Games (video)

Postmortems and anecdotes

The bulk of this section is the epic postmortem of Star Wars Galaxies wherein I discuss the way in which the economy, procedural content systems, and social systems were designed… and talk about the failures around Jedi and ultimately what led to the NGE, which stands to this day as an object lesson for MMO developers.

Ultima Online is fifteen
Star Wars Galaxies Temporary Enemy Flagging
A Jedi Saga
SWG’s Dynamic World
Designing a Living Society, part 1
Designing a Living Society, part 2
Did Star Wars Galaxies Fail?

Game criticism-related

These essays aren’t about game design per se, but more about how we talk about games. They aren’t “formal” enough to fit into the “game grammar” category, though, as they are mostly about topics more on the humanities side, or even about games criticism as a field, or how we as developers and critics talk to one another. Some of these were controversial, but it’s because of that that I include them on the list; they were part of a large conversation that took place, and it was an important one.

Two cultures and games
Damsels in distress
A Letter to Leigh
A New Formalism (talk)
Interactivity
Interactive Mountain
The Devil Wears Prada game
On personal games

Theory of Fun and game grammar

This is stuff directly related to the very formal exploration I’ve been doing of “how games work” for over a decade now. It’s less directly applicable than the stuff in the general game design section, but is instead more structural.

A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later
Why do we like a given game?
Why are QTE’s so popular?
Every genre is only one game
Playing with “game” (essay)
On choice architectures
Playing with “game” (talk, which is quite different from the essay)
When is a Clone
Games vs Sports
Game Grammar (talk)
Teaching to Fish (talk)

Games and society

These are all about the impact of games on our everyday world, more or less. Some of them are very concrete and specific, and others are a lot more intellectual. Many of them are about how we can work to create ethically. Several of them are outside of “games” per se. I’m particularly proud of “Digital Bards,” even though several other ones from here got a lot more traction.

How Games Think (talk)
Social media is broken
Wikipedia is a Game (talk)
High Windows (talk, actually from 2008 but wasn’t available until this time window)
Community Management in the Culture Wars (talk)
Games affecting people
Digital Bards (talk)
Still Logged In (talk)

Game industry/business

These are mostly about games as a business; some of them are a little bit dated in terms of referencing events from when they were written, but I think they are all still very relevant.

Oscar bait
Requiring online for single-player
Musings on the Oculus sale
Is this the future?
The Financial Future of Game Developers
How to build the scary future today
AR is an MMO
I really did mean “MMO”
An Industry Lifecycle

Game design practice/developer advice

These are about being a game developer, and advice on things like creativity, career, and evaluating your and other people’s work.

Self-promotion for game developers
Ways to be right
Tools don’t stifle art!
On getting criticism
A vision exercise
How I analyze a game
Practical Creativity (talk)
Practicing the creativity habit

Microvision emulator release

I’ve been working for a while–five years!–on my emulation arcade cabinet, entitled Press Start: Emulating Videogame History. I started with a stock cabinet and control panel, and have been gradually modding it with stuff, like a robotics-driven auto-rotating monitor, LED lighting that matches whatever game is launched, and additional controls. I’ve been slowly working on getting emulation set up on it for everything historically important from Tennis for Two on forward.

But that’s another story. I mention it only because it led me to this little project.

The very first handheld console that supported cartridges was called the Microvision, and it was made by Milton Bradley in 1979. It had a 16×16 pixel LCD screen, and of course the only color it supported on that screen was black. Only a dozen or so games were ever made for it, and it was pulled from the market only two years later, losing the popularity contest to Nintendo’s Game and Watch series as well as the myriad other handhelds that emerged around the same time. It would take until 1989 before someone else gave the handheld cartridge idea a shot — that device was called the Gameboy. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the Microvision helped inspire the Game and Watch series.

The Microvision had a lot of issues. Carts were giant plastic overlays that clicked on to the top of the whole device; it was apparently easy to mess up the insertion process, enough so that the manual actually included troubleshooting steps. A transparent plastic overlay sat over the screen to confer some amount of color and user interface to the primitive display. A 12 key keypad and a small paddle knob were the controls, but not all games used all the keys, so the carts actually covered up the buttons that weren’t in use, and left holes for the keys that were, with a thin film labeling the buttons. This film was apparently quite susceptible to being punctured by fingernails.

But worst of all, the early LCD screen technology was susceptible to “screen rot.” They weren’t backlit, but if exposed to sunlight, they started to go bad and eventually ceased to function. Many if not most working Microvisions out there have this problem now, and eventually, they all will stop working.

Now, clearly I wanted to have an emulator for this historically important little handheld. But a lot of the early systems are poorly emulated, and the Microvision was, until recently, no exception. There was a Javascript simulator written by Bob Eichler, that had some of the games coded up. There was a German emulator done in 2008, but it handled only one game. MAME/MESS added the driver back in 2013, but it was labeled “non-working.”

Then in 2014, Paul Robson, who is apparently quite active in the retro community, wrote an emulator, got hold of dumps of every game, and even ported the core logic over to Arduino and managed to build a working new Microvision, as part of a RetroChallenge. (He’s done a lot of stellar work on other devices and platforms too). He also helpfully open-sourced the code. He even wrote two new games for it: a port of Space Invaders, and a simple little bombing game.

As I tried to get it set up in my cabinet, though, I immediately ran into a few limitations. The biggest: the emulator only ran in a window at 800×600. It supported importing BMP files for the overlays, but Robson had only made one, for Pinball. It was pretty barebones.

But as I started playing, the games were mostly pretty fun. So I started making overlays… and then I tracked down the source code and figured out how to compile it… and here we are now, after a week of work. Here is a side by side of Robson’s last version, and of what I am releasing today.

This package includes an updated emulator supporting full screen from the command line, snaps of the carts so you can see which buttons do what, and upgraded visuals on the actual emulation. I also made overlays for every game available, including Robson’s two homebrew games, as well as fake cart snaps for those two games. The colors on the new overlays are matched as closely as I can get to the originals, and I even managed to match the exact font used on the original carts (Futura Normal for most, but Sea Duel used Helvetica Neue. Hey, it was the seventies…).

This download includes everything you need to play all the games that exist. It has all the cart snaps and overlays and .bin files for the games. In simplest form, you can simply drag any of the .bin files onto mvem.exe and start playing in an 800×600 window. But for a better experience, I suggest opening a command line or using an emulator frontend:

mvem "Block Buster.bin" 1920x1080x1

will launch Block Buster at full screen on a 1080 monitor. The last digit should be either 0 or 1 for windowed or fullscreen. Honestly, 800×600 is a bit small to be able to see the key hints on the snap on the left, but I left it that way given the prevalence of 720p screens out there on notebooks these days.

Download: MVEM Build 15 emulator package (95,208KB)

If you want manuals for the games (which I recommend, some of them are obvious and others are impenetrable), lots of snaps, and the like, you should head over to this link, where ranger_lennier uploaded a treasure trove of them back in 2013. I’d host a mirror, but my website host might well get mad, it’s a lot of high-res images.

I haven’t gotten around to compiling a Mac version, and I may not. I also may not maintain this version, to be honest — I know nothing at all about the actual emulation part of the code, and carefully avoided touching it in favor of only doing cosmetic changes to the user experience.  If changes are needed for  better emulation accuracy (there may be some errors in the dumps of the games, based on what I read) then Paul Robson is a far better source than I am for information.

That said, if anyone out there wants to build a Mac version or keep working on the emulator, here is a ZIP of the source code and Code::Blocks project that I put together. I make no guarantees that it’s pretty, but I did try to comment where I added things. It may take some work to even get the project set up; the project file was missing from Paul’s original upload and I had to reconstruct it, paths to things like SDL are sure to need changed, and in zipping it up I actually rearranged the directories a bit so it probably doesn’t open out of the box.

Download: MVEM_dev.zip (87,282KB)

Many thanks to Paul Robson for all his hard work and expertise and I hope he doesn’t mind that I mangled his code; to ranger_lennier for the scans; to the one and only Microvision website over at Atari2600land; and the Microvision info over at the Handheld Museum.

I never owned a Microvision, and don’t think I ever saw one in the wild. Playing the games renewed my appreciation for how we can stuff play into something incredibly tiny, and making this small contribution to making it easier for others to have that experience also increased my appreciation for all those who work to keep all of this history alive.

Now I have one less excuse for not making something of my own again… must cast about for some other major distraction.

Podcast with Keith Burgun

I did a 90 minute interview with Keith Burgun of Clockwork Game Design and Game Design Theory fame. We talked about all sorts of things — my emulation cabinet, the state of game design theory, naturally occurring ludic systems — and argued towards the end over whether a games are made of games. There’s a shoutout towards Katharine Neil’s recent work, especially her wonderful article giving the history of late 90s/early 2000s attempts to codify game design practices.

You can listen here: Game Grammar and Game Design Theory – Interview with Raph Koster – keithburgun.net

Recent videos & interviews

I tweeted about these, but neglected to mention them here on the blog, so here’s a roundup!

First up is my favorite, this video by Zoyander Street of Critical Distance, for First Person Scholar. He was in town and came by my house to talk games; we ended up in my loft, where I keep the boardgame collection and do boardgame design, talking about abstract games and their rich history. You can just barely see the arcade machine off to the left there; it’s got a huge chunk of videogaming history emulated on it.

We didn’t talk about all the games on the table — there’s quite a range. I did get asked on Twitter what the book was — it’s R. C. Bell’s Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations.

Next is a pair of things from GDC, where I spent time chatting with GamesIndustry.biz. The first is a podcast I did alongside with Justin Ma of Subset Games, makers of the phenomenal FTL. Listening back, I feel like I kinda stomped all over him speaking.

Commentary on “Still Logged In”

I seem to have touched a bit of a nerve with my talk at GDC! (The page for the talk with slides and video is here). Some of the coverage and links so far:

While the official talk title is “What Social VR and AR Can Learn From MMOs”, it gradually becomes quite clear that anyone working in tech nowadays — or for that matter, anyone interested in the future of real world governance — should watch it too..

Why are new VR/AR developers so slow to learn from past MMO experience?

“I think a lot of them don’t even think to look,” Raph tells me, “or think with the goggles first, like I mentioned in the talk. After all, social media web people didn’t look either.”

— New World Notes

It also hit BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow wrote quite a little essay around it:

Raph describes this year’s speech as “darker” than in previous years, and I don’t know if that’s the right word — more like “angry.” Koster is angry at the proliferation of abusive behavior in online worlds, especially in the new VR and AR worlds, which are recapitulating every stupid mistake made in share online spaces all the way back to text MUDs.

But the designers of Koster’s era had an excuse: they were making mistakes no one had ever made before. The current crop of designers — all the way up to Marc Zuckerberg, who so disgusted Koster during a job interview that Koster publicly says he never expects to work for Facebook again — are making mistakes that have been lavishly documented, and the only explanation for making these mistakes again is either cruelty or depraved indifference to cruelty.

— BoingBoing

After the talk, I was also asked a bunch of questions by the MIT Technology Review:

Raph Koster, a high-profile video-game designer whose hits include the multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies, thinks VR trolling is in fact likely to get worse. He used a keynote at the gaming industry’s giant GDC conference in San Francisco earlier this month to warn that VR companies need to do more than offer victims defensive tools such as space bubbles and mute features. He says companies will have to start more actively curating, investigating, and punishing bad user behavior, for example by hiring dedicated staff.

“If anything, the behavior now is better than it will ever be,” says Koster of the current moment in social VR. He says his experience launching Ultima Online, one of the first virtual environments that could host thousands of people at once, showed that when more people start visiting a virtual space, trolling becomes more of a problem because they feel more anonymous. “When you get strangers bumping up against one another they behave more poorly,” he says. “Peer pressure is one of the things that keeps people behaving well.”

— MIT Technology Review

This also led to an article over at Massively Overpowered, where there is a lively discussion in the comments.

So… here to speak for people who’ve played sandbox MMORPGs is veteran MMORPG designer Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Crowfall), plainly quoted in the article to point out how adorably innocent and naive the VR devs are about human nature online in virtual worlds.

— MassivelyOverpowered

MMORPG.com also joined the fray:

Koster speaks to the social and ethical implications of “turning the real world into a virtual world” and that MMORPGs have provided a foundation for such through lessons learned over the course of their history.

The hour long presentation explores some of the issues and ethical conundrums that both players and developers face when participating in VR/AR games. His contention is that game designers are in the best position to help others enjoy life.

— MMORPG.com

In addition, it popped up on the usual places like MetaFilter and Hacker News and even in some extensive coverage on 4Gamer.net in Japan, and there were a lot of great comments from Twitter:

(and even if you're NOT working in one of those fields, but use online communities [LIKE TWITTER], it's a fascinating, important talk)

— kris graft (@krisgraft) March 15, 2017

My 2nd "must watch" GDC talk rec (see my TL for last night's): @raphkoster on what AR/VR can learn from MMO's: https://t.co/HlcmiUUbLY

— T.L. Taylor (@ybika) March 14, 2017

Best talk I saw at GDC! RT @raphkoster: Video of my GDC talk “Still Logged In” https://t.co/M0tc7GHgiH pic.twitter.com/mgwGNp5peC

— Mia Consalvo (@miaC) March 14, 2017

If you're designing or building VR spaces then you need to watch Raph lay down decades of social system know-how: https://t.co/3v5AoMaJ5G

— The F is for

Video of my GDC talk “Still Logged In”

Well, I just watched it, and yeah, I was grim and pulled no punches.

Slides for “Still Logged In,” my GDC talk

I have put up a page containing both a slideshow and a PDF download of the talk I delivered on Friday at GDC 2017.

I think it came out a bit more somber than I had anticipated, certainly more somber than the sample slides I submitted. We shall see what the long-term reaction is, as I pulled no punches in describing the awesome responsibility people have in building online communities.

I was also losing my voice, so it was very much a deliberate and slow presentation compared to my usual “high speed brain blast” as one attendee once described my usual speaking style.

Not only was this in the afternoon of the last day, but I was opposite the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, which is one of the best-attended sessions at GDC usually. So the room was definitely sparser than usual. That said, there were several old virtual worlds hands present to confirm what I said, backing me up during the Q&A period, and there were also a number of current developers of both social VR worlds and even social AR games like PokemonGO. (In fact, I heard a few members of that team were in the audience, and I hope I didn’t offend by picking on their game so much).

The session was filmed, so hopefully video will be forthcoming; once it is, I will post a link to that as well.

Some updates

Wow, I have been slacking off on the blogging. Not since October? Yeesh.

What’s happened is that I have been posting updates to Twitter, instead. Which this blog does notify (as well as Facebook), of course, but it does mean the site itself gets neglect!

So, to catch you up!

I am speaking at GDC 2017 next Friday, 1:30-2:30pm, on the topic “Still Logged In: What VR and AR Can Learn From MMOs.” This talk will be going over lessons painfully learned going clear back to the text mud days, on issues like harassment, governance, importation of bias to the virtual world, and much more. It’s cross-listed on the Design and Advocacy tracks; I think this latter means that I am allowed to be grumpy on stage.
The 10th Anniversary Edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design goes to press in Korean next week! It looks like the picture on the right, and I hope to get a copy soon. Meanwhile, despite the book’s advanced age, it continues to get featured regularly in various places, such as this podcast.
I improved my “history of all videogames” arcade cabinet with upgraded robotic parts so that the monitor now smoothly auto-rotates from horizontal (for landscape arcade games and most home consoles) to vertical (for stuff like Centipede, Raiden, and of course, Vectrex emulation). I did a lengthy write-up of the process and am incredibly tickled that it’s now stickied on the ArcadeControls.com forum (the central hub for anyone building or restoring arcade cabinets) for reference for anyone else who wants to do the same. Video of the rotation is also at that link.
My 2014 talk on “Practical Creativity” also keeps getting attention, most recently as a GDC Video on YouTube (also on preceding link), which also has prompted folks to request a PDF of the slides, which was helpfully assembled by @B4ttleCat on Twitter. Grab it here.
You can also find an abridged version of my little piece on Games design and UX design in Portuguese now, thanks to Andressa Antunes. This is another one that seems to have legs, and gets cited a lot lately.
I managed to make it, despite a cold, to Doctor Cat’s amazing marathon “Gaming Legends” Twitch stream of interviews of developers. Video was posted up a while back. I encourage you to check out all the videos, if you have a full 13 hours of free time… there’s some amazing stuff in there. Scott Adams, Jordan Weisman, Steve Meretzky, Bruce Shelley, Lord British, John Romero, and lots more.

There’s been quite a lot more, but maybe I should just direct you to the Twitter feed (which is now working again in the sidebar).

Um, I’d promise to blog more often, and particularly, not just make it be random brags and updates about talks but back to meaty articles. But my track record hasn’t been great. Tell you what, once I get back from GDC, maybe people might throw me questions.