In other news, I will be contributing, collaborating and generally drinking all the rum over at KTR with that gang of scallywags. Just started, so go check it now before I start writing more for them and things inevitably go to hell from that point on.

The cynical in me thinks he would’ve said exactly the same thing.

There is one nebulous constant in these things we call MMOs, PEGs and MPGs. That is, the ultimate quality of the game – how many imaginary units of pleasure we extract from it when we play it – is directly tied to and controlled, willingly or not, by the other people who also play it. It’s difficult to put a finger on, on one hand because it’s not contemplated at all in the game design, on the other hand because it’s an intangible we’re generally not very comfortable dealing with.

This is the first one in a series of posts that will dive into the murky waters of social gaming. Maybe even come back with a pearl. Read on.

Just what is Social Gaming?

Social Gaming is a definition, as good or bad as any other, that attempts to classify the intangible elements a player perceives or feels as he plays the game, and are directly influenced not by any of the areas relevant to the game design itself, but from the presence, actions or inactions of other players playing in the same shared space.

As any player plays a game, at any level of seriousness or involvement, the player’s mind is given elements by the game, and those elements remain there. The game’s quality in sound or graphics, for example, are always in the player’s mind as he plays the game, gathered by the player’s senses. The game’s rules, features and their execution also claim an important part of the players mind-time. And of course, the social aspect of shared games – as stated before, the presence, actions an inactions of other players – are also present as well.

The social aspect is the most unapproachable, to a great extent because it’s not contemplated in the game design itself. A game designer can create his game or world to the rules of his choosing, but most of the time his design is concerned with the intrinsic qualities of features of the game itself, and little else. A designer can make his graphics to have any style, his sound and music to convey any mood and his rules to establish any kind of gameplay, but the social aspect of the game itself is impenetrable to the design. This is the territory of the players themselves, and perhaps it’s precisely this which gives it that aura of impenetrability, of an organic landscape reigned by a chaotic system – the very opposite of design itself. A designer usually has no tools and no ideas to deal with the kind of social mindscape the players create for themselves, because this mindscape is created after the design is done, and the game completed.

In all honesty, I doubt most designers are even concerned with the social aspect their creations generate.  However, the social aspects of games, particularly our contemporary shared gaming experiences, do deserve a second look and I feel warrant an examination. If nothing else, for the mere reason of the comparatively outstanding amount of mindtime and mindspace the social aspect creates in players, which is much bigger and stronger than the spaces design elements proper create. In fact, I put it forward that players, at a minimum, spend as much time (if not more time) dealing and immersed in social aspects as they do dealing and immersed with intrinsic game design elements.

So, to end with a more concise, yet more complete definition: Social Gaming is the part of the game experience a player extracts from a game, normally not considered by the game design a priori, and always shaped by the presence, actions and inactions of other players.

Why should designers even care about Social Gaming?

There are many facets of design and what design tries to accomplish. Sometimes, design is the tool used to translate precise ideas from thought into reality. Game rules are the prime example of this. Design also can serve to emphasize and create particular moods or styles, via art. For this, we have to look no further than graphics and sound.

But there is another facet of design that is just as important: Design is also concerned with the final, general quality of a game. Design is responsible for presenting an attractive final game to the players. A game that players would find fun and entertaining, would be drawn to it instead of repulsed, and would like to play. Games, after all, exist to be played, and a game without players is not a game, but merely an exercise in design. Effective and successful design creates in turn effective and successful games.

In this vein, it should be very much in the mind of the designer just how much are players enjoying his game, since that’s the game’s raison d’etre. A skilled designer would pay attention to the common facets of design, of course. The rules must be good and make sense. Graphics and sound must be attractive. But the social aspects are commonly absent from the designer’s thought. Why is this? If we have established previously that the social aspects occupy so much of the player’s mind in time and space, why is it that this area is usually left to its own devices, normally given very little thought?

Part of this, I surmise, is due to designer self-censorship or perhaps a lack of confidence in his own abilities. Perhaps even doubt, in the designer’s mind, that he even has a mandate to regulate the flow of the social aspect in his own game. Curiously enough, most designers have no problem controlling, shaping or vectoring player behavior from the very design. For example, if a designer does not want players to combat or kill each other in certain areas of the world, he simply disables their ability to do so in the design. If he wants to limit the amount of game money players have, or to curb it somehow, he introduces ‘money sinks’ in the design. If he wants to have areas where players are free to combat and kill each other, he does so as well. Those are very common examples of a designer and a design directly influencing player behavior.

Yet, for some reason, the same designer might feel apprehensive at touching the social aspects of his game, or even feel he has no reason, mandate or authority to do so. Why this dichotomy?

Social Gaming: a creature of un-design

Part of this reluctance from designers to interfere in the social aspects of a game is born out of simple ignorance. Designers most of the time are ignorant this area even exists, or simply do not recognize it as an important part of the game experience. It’s something for the GMs to deal with in-game, and the customer service team in the forums. Doesn’t belong in design itself.

However, an interesting question at this point would be: How much easier, or how much different would be the task of GMs and customer service teams if the social aspects of the game would be considered in the design instead of left to evolve or devolve on their own?

Take EVE and their developer-player scandal recently. Part of the responsibility, of course, lies on CCP for their inadequate handling of the situation from beginning to end. But it must not be forgotten that part of this debacle came to pass because of certain practices the EVE community engaged in, practices that were well-known to CCP, but still left to pass becase CCP might have felt it wasn’t in their competence to do anything about it.

The lesson to extract from this: If a design does not contemplate or regulate the social aspect of the game, the presence, actions and inactions of players, these will happen regardless, evolve with their own shape and could potentially influence the quality of the game as a whole.

What kind of tools do designers have to tackle social aspects of a game from the design itself? More tools than we think. Certainly, the number of things designers can do to tackle this area is much bigger than the will of the same designers to do them. But as far as these tools go, that’s material for part two of this. For now, suffice it to say that the social landscape is basically left untouched by designers, because it’s commonly felt that this area is (or worse, should be) a creature of un-design. Something that ‘just spawns’, inside the game, but separate. The disconnect comes from the fact that players very much do not perceive it that way. For players, the social aspects are almost unequivocally part of the very game they play; designers feel it’s separate, so it’s hardly ever touched.

Part two will come… when it’s done.

Well, I’ve been playing LOTRO for a while now. Everyone in the world must have posted their impressions, but I thought I’d wait a bit and not rush only to say things I’ll retract or amend later. I know myself, and I know I have a big mouth sometimes.

I’ll just make it short and sweet.

- Yes, the environments are just gorgeous. Probably, in many respects and in many zones, the most beautiful and convincing I’ve seen. So, major thumbs up in that area. Nothing to reproach. However, this is balanced – in my eye at least – with the character graphics.

The first thing that always jumps up at me every time I log in is how the characters, players, NPCs and mobs alike, don’t seem to fit visually with their environments. I don’t know if it’s the lighting, the way they’re shaded or what. I thought at first I was coming up with a nasty case of the uncanny valley (look it up), but I thought about it and I’m not bothered by the quality of the models. I think they’re fine. I don’t mind them. It’s the way they don’t seem to gel with the world around them, visually.

- I’m generally liking the armor and weapons design. WoW had a more fantastic mandate when it came to its design, so it could get away with more esoteric stuff. LOTRO’s design is definitely more real-world. The texture and model detail is just much, much better, so no complains there.

The one bad thing to note in this area is that the ‘catalogue’ seems to be way too short. Many different items share the same graphics, some of them only with minor variations in color. I’m assuming most of these are using placeholder graphics, to be expanded as the game goes along, but as it is now the variety is a bit lacking.

- It’s a carbon copy of WoW when it comes to mechanics, so nothing to write home about. The only two most noteworthy additions are the deeds and conjunction systems. I’m liking conjunctions, they add a new -if eventually thin- layer to grouping. Pretty good.

I’m still unconvinced with the deeds/traits system. Not so much the deeds. That’s fine. But character customization of skills via the acquired traits? I find that lacking. This is not the place to go at length and disassemble the system, but suffice it to say it’s not deep or wide enough. You’ll end up with identical characters running around, everyone with the same desirable skills or traits, for (I imagine) most of the way to 50. Itemization doesn’t help much, because all stats are way light. You have to pile a ton on one stat to start seeing a difference.

The end result is bland. This is something that needs to be addressed to take care of the longevity of the game, unless Turbine is planning to just keep it alive via itemization.

- The minstrel as the healing class is very good. The lack of a tandem/comparable/additional healer class, not so much. Back to WoW, Priests were the healers, yes, but many times it was perfectly possible to swing it with a Paladin or a Druid. There are no ‘half-healers’ in LOTRO, and while other classes can throw a heal every now and then, this does not happen on demand, which results in a group unable to count on those heals. Ultimately, there’s only one healer class. The minstrel. And for some instances, you can’t swing it with anything else. So if there’s no minstrel around, you’re essentially done for.

I’m expecting this to be addressed at some point. Either with a new healing class (doubtful) or a major revamp of Lore-masters or Captains to let them provide more healing on demand.

- Launch went well, servers are stable and other than a brief hiccup in service a few days ago, they’ve been performing rather admirably. So kudos to Turbine for that. Very smooth experience so far.

- I didn’t bother with crafting. It just holds no interest to me. My wife is really into it, however, so I’m vicariously learning a thing or two. Still, as I posted earlier, it’s fundamentally broken. So, while it can provide the fleeting useful item every now and then, it’s mostly meaningless. Unless they take the WoW route and fill the endgame with a need for resist gear that has to be crafted, going by what I’ve seen so far, world itemization and quest rewards not only compete with crafting, they leave it in the dust.

- I think the login procedure is a disaster. Takes too long to actually start the game and log in. For example, there’s no need for the launcher to give me the option of choosing which server to play in (and of course wasting time in querying them all). I have all my characters in one server – I should be able to select it once and automatically log into that server just by starting the game. Give me an option, a button, to select another server if I want to… but forcing me to stare at a server list only for me to select the same one 100% of the time is nonsense. Same with the cinematics (I’m sure there’s a way to disable them – nice as they are) and with the splash screen about the expansion. Why not put the expansion news on the launcher screen instead of adding yet another stop in the middle of logging?

It’d also be nice on the character screen to see the location my characters last logged off. Sometimes I don’t remember and it’s good to know.

- Interface: A mess, really. The actual game UI is WoW-like. Simple and that’s about it. But the social panel is terrible to use. Too convoluted. The auctions panel is pretty bad as well. No tabbing between fields, no selecting the whole search string text with one click -or a ‘clear field’ button-. Pretty poor usability overall. I find myself dreading it when I need to use them. Same with the mail interface. Auto-fill in for names in your friends list or your kinship should be a no-brainer, as well as allowing multiple attachments.

They really, really need to improve this area or open up the system for mod makers to do it (doubtful).

- Despite its bad points, I find myself having some fun. I’m not bored with it at all. It does have a few nice encounters, and the instances I’ve seen so far are pretty well-designed. Very interesting visually. Overall, I have to say that my experience has been constantly hovering between fun (though not orgasmic fun) and slightly underwhelmed. The game’s been out for a week or so, so there’s plenty of time for things to be corrected if there’s a will to do it.

Time will tell, of all the grievances and bad points, which ones are genuine bugs or things to be corrected and which ones are design decisions, never to be ‘fixed’, no matter what the playerbase thinks.

Talking about gold farming, it said something a bit scary. Not scary in itself, perhaps, but scary how we should have seen it coming earlier. Mentioning the new ‘trends’ in RMT and gold farming, the blurb said how some professional gold farmers were turning into hacking and mass raiding of accounts instead of the dirty daily business of collecting gold the hard way. Some farmers were finding this to be faster and more ‘efficient’. My thinking is that if it really is faster and more efficient, it’s only a matter of (short) time until the rest of the farmers catch on.

How to combat this? Biometrics.

The thought of having to identify oneself to play a game seems preposterous enough at first, but that’s what we’ve been doing ever since we started logging into our online games. So it’s not the act. What is it then?

A login and a password is a good system, and worked well for a long time. In fact, it still works well for the vast majority of players. The problem comes when RMT enters the picture (something that was unheard of a few years ago, by large) and gold farmers are turning to be more and more proactive. Before RMT, the thought of hacking any game account seemed ludicrous. Ridiculous. What was the point? Very little, in fact. Other than a prank, a revenge attack or some other precise and minuscule reason, it made no sense. Game accounts had no value. It was just players playing a game. Silly.

But RMT changed that. Now, after RMT, game accounts are not silly and they have value. How much value? As the old adage goes, as much as people are willing to pay for them. Or, in this case, their value goes as far as hackers are willing to go to hack and raid them of game valuables.

Because, think whatever you want about RMT and gold farmers, but if one thing is certain is that these people are not stupid. Money – real money, not chocolate game money – is their bottom line 24/7. It’s a business. And if they are, in fact, turning to hacking and raiding to acquire the game gold they resell, it means that it makes financial sense for them to do it. Otherwise they would not do it, period.

This means that if game accounts are valuable to them, they should be valuable to the players as well. Protect your game assets sounds so terribly silly. But then again, most of us come from a time where that sentence was in reality silly. Nowadays, it’s not as silly. Question time: Would you play a game, or be happy with a game that would let anyone access your account? Quite possibly no. Your account is yours. In that case, we should really go to whatever lengths are necessary to protect that account.

Logins and passwords work and work well for a vast majority of people. It’s a simple, elegant solution that most people immediately understand. But, if these reports of proactive RMTers are to be believed, if this thing of raiding accounts continues it remains to be seen how effective logins and passwords ultimately are. They worked, undoubtedly, in the times when game accounts were not a target. When they were not under attack. So, if accounts have become a target. If logins and passwords are phished or trojaned ten or twenty times as often, would they still hold as a solution? I have a hunch that no. Specially considering the thought and care your average gamer puts into selecting a complicated password and keeping it safe.

So, enter biometrics. It’s a solution, just as many others (security professionals, feel free to chime in, please). How to apply biometrics to all this? It needs to be cheap, it needs to be simple and it needs to have a backup plan for when it doesn’t work.

Cheap – Because we’re talking about games here, not six-figure security IT solutions. Sure, you wouldn’t probably pay $100 or something like that for a fingerprint reader dongle to log into your game. But if the game maker were to strike a deal with the dongle maker, and bundle the dongle with the game? And if all you paid was a $2-$5 extra on your monthly sub? How’s that for a deal? Would you go for it then?

Simple – Because simplicity is good and we’re not trying to break into Fort Knox here, just to log into a game. And because gamers are dumb (there I said it).

Backup – Because gamers will most probably end up treating this thing with the same care as a controller. And we know how that always ends up. Once it breaks, there needs to be a vanilla login/password system in place, because hell hath no fury like a gamer who can’t log in.

Looking around in less than a minute I found this little thing. It’s probably not exactly what we’re discussing here, but it does fits the parameters of cheap and simple. It’s $60. If Verant could bundle a stick of RAM with your cereal box for EQ years ago, others can bundle something like this and charge it a little bit on your monthly sub. I’m sure there are other systems, better suited to the task at hand and possibly cheaper even.

Now the obligatory final disclaimer: If people would take care of selecting, rotating and protecting their passwords, account raiding wouldn’t be as viable. If people would take care to avoid downloading trojans, many, many passwords wouldn’t be stolen. There is no IT security solution that can replace having common sense and gray matter between the ears.

Gamers and ITSec peeps, feel free to chime in.

I’m not a thorough gamer, and I can admit that without problems. I haven’t played every game ever made by humans, and I’m fine with that. There are some games that I just naturally avoided without even touching them as if they were an antimatter enema. See, I don’t need to know which doctors can perform the procedure, or if my insurance would cover it. I just avoid it. I know there’s nothing there for me, other than the elemental forces that make up the very universe, clashing and releasing a vile torrent of subatomic pain – a burning cosmic feast in my exhaust.

Some others I just never got around to play because I was playing something else/better at the time. So even if I could have gotten around to do it, I probably wouldn’t have cared much.

But, the problem is that everyone else seems to have played them, and I’m reduced to being some sort of a pariah when the subject comes up. It’s not that I feel bad because people dismiss my expertise in them – I know I don’t have any experience with these games. It’s different. With some of these titles, the mere mention of having never played them kicks me a couple of steps down the unspoken gaming hierarchy. It usually starts with “Eeewww… you really never…? Eeewww!“. It ain’t pretty.

Some of them, top of my head:

If the nice little graphic accompanying the post wasn’t any indication, first and foremost any of the Final Fantasy games. I just never played them. Sure, having never owned a console definitely assists in that feat, but what people put to me is that I could have gotten one and played them. I won’t pass judgment on that statement, because in the lands of vast disposable income it may very well be valid. But the underlying motive is that the games never appealed to me. Not that I hate JRPGs or anything. My interest just fell far from the FF games very early on, I think for one reason mostly: When I found out that all the five million different FF games were not part of an overarching story, dispensed in chapters like that, but were (more or less) separate entities just sharing a name. I thought that was milking of the lowest caliber, and it turned me off immediately. Maybe rightly so, maybe not, but it did. In any case, there it is. Let the pariah say it again: I never played any Final Fantasy game, and probably never will.

Moving on, another kind of games that everyone seems to have played but I didn’t is the whole SWAT/Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon/Splinter Cell type of thing. I suppose at some point I might have gotten some very light contact with an early SWAT at a friend’s house or something, and found it so unappealing that it turned me off from the rest pretty much by default. And I’m sure they’re good games. I kept and keep hearing mostly good things about the Splinter Cells, but I just can’t force myself to commit to it. It’s not that dislike ‘Tactical Shooters’, ‘Stealthy Games’ or whatever the microgenre is called. Hell, I love ‘Thief’. These games just never called me sweetly, so I never replied.

I played Baldur’s Gate (not a lot), but I could never, ever get into Icewind Dale. Shock. Horror. I know. I think I played 15 minutes of it, then duly abandoned it. Everyone else swears by it. I just shrug.

Quake 3. Now I’ll say this from the beginning, so it’s clear: I’ve always been more of an Unreal/UT type of guy. Fine. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like Quake games by default. Not at all. I played Quake and Quake 2 pretty intensely back in the day. I liked them. I just could never get into this one. It felt hollow and exceedingly functional at the expense of form from the get go. A tech demo, more than a game. So I promptly shelved it.

Battlefield (x), and insert there whatever suffix. I thought they were horrible games. Clunky, inconvenient and just plain un-fun to me. Yet for a while it seemed everyone and their aunts were playing those. Like a hermit, I purposely kept myself out of that loop. Then I got flogged for it. But I resist, even today.

Well, there are more but I don’t wanna be here all day. What are yours? What games you never played, but everyone else apparently did?

It went from there, and I got more or less dogpiled (but in a very good way), which gave me the opportunity to think a little about this. Meaningless musing follows.

Their position was quite simple, and probably quite right as well: It’s frustrating when real life attacks, and one player in a regular group of friends is forced to take a break. Upon his return, he finds his friends had kept on advancing and suddenly he can’t adventure with them. They’ve advanced too much for his level.

Which, I think, it’s a valid concern. If you have a regular gaming group, you eventually develop friendships, or those friendships existed beforehand. You play the game for the game, sure, but also as an activity with these people. Their concern at the creation of a progress gap certainly has merit.

However, I think mine does too. So I have to repeat myself, “Why shouldn’t a player that hasn’t played for a week or two be left behind by those who did play?”. Because my thinking is that your in-game progress is produced, precisely, by playing the game – not by not playing the game. If you play, you progress. If you don’t, you don’t. Simple as that. Of course this creates progress gaps, but there isn’t anything you can do about it.

Or is there? The most common system I’ve seen to mitigate that progress gap is a rest xp system. Sure, you do not gain xp while you don’t play, but once you return the game gives you a break and allows you to gain xp at an accelerated rate so it’s easier for you to catch up. I think it’s a good system. It compromises where it should compromise. It acknowledges that real life intersects badly sometimes, but also doesn’t give the non-players any undue advantages over the players. What do I mean by this? I mean simply that if I, a player, have played for a month and gained (x) units of imaginary progress, whenever a non-player returns, to give him a way, as per mechanics, to eliminate the gap altogether and instantly and perform as if he also had (x) units of imaginary progress would inevitably cheapen my own and force me to rethink the value of my own progress.

In other words, if a player that hasn’t played for a month can simply start playing again and perform essentially the same, or almost just as effectively as I have, then why in the name of Cthulhu did I waste my time progressing all through that month?

The vibe I got from the discussion at that point is that such respect for consistent mechanics had no merit. Or rather, it was superseded by the need, the will or the ‘right’, if there’s such a thing, for people to play with their friends if they so wished, mechanics and the intrinsic value of character progress be damned. I think that’s a bit selfish.

Like the example I put forth in the discussion. I like to play with my friend Joey. But when he takes off for a week and he comes back, seemingly with little or no difference in his effectiveness, I’d be peeved. Surely not at Joey, but at a game that allows me to progress for a week or however long, then decree that whatever difference accrued is worthless. If I can play for a week, a month or a year more than you, why shouldn’t that difference show and matter? And if the difference doesn’t matter, then why did I bother playing the game in the first place then?

People then pointed at other options. Rest xp was mentioned, of course, but -for some reason- wasn’t universally accepted as the best way to handle progress gaps. EVE’s offline leveling was also brought up as a good thing, seeing as how avatars effectively do progress while the player is not playing. CoH’s sidekick/downgrade system was also touted as probably ‘the’ best system that let friends play together without the progress gap mattering.

To which I replied, half seriously and half in jest, how WoW didn’t have any of those things except rest xp, and there it was. Still being the #1 MMO ever with millions of players, with few people denouncing the creation of progress gaps as game-breaking issues.

No one, in my estimation, had a good answer for that. I wasn’t trying to knock those other systems. I think they all have merits and drawbacks, in their own ways. I was just pointing at a successful (by far and large) example of a game that doesn’t really give much of a damn about the existence of progress gaps, yet there it is still. Successful as ever, pretty much, despite its longevity.

And I’m most definitely not knocking off, or dismissing those whose main preoccupation is to play with their friends. What I put to them is, yes… you want to play with your friends whenever you want. But at what cost? At the cost of making their progress meaningless? How would you like it when the tables turn and it’s their turn to lag behind? Would you really like it for the game to decree your accrued progress as insignificant just so they don’t feel left out and have to catch up?

That’s probably why I like rest xp the most. Because it doesn’t automatically allow the non-players to return and perform just as the players after only five minutes of playing. With rest xp, non-players still have to ‘work’ to close the gap, we’re only letting them do it a bit faster. Rest xp doesn’t do anything to shorten or eliminate the distance between players and non-players; what it does is to shorten the time needed to bridge the gap, and nothing more. Non-players still have to close it. Which is a far cry from people demanding for everyone else’s progress to stop mattering just so they don’t have to catch up and feel left out.

Which leads me to another interesting observation I came across during the discussion: People don’t just want the cake, they do very much want to eat it too.

As an example of this, a couple of comments shed some light on the personal experiences of some players. One of them, a WoW player, said he and his friends had abandoned the game because, and I paraphrase, it was too much of a hassle for said friends to keep up with the others’ progress in order to play together. Sure enough, and soon enough, they all had created the obligatory army of alts to still play around other friends’ schedules, but they got tired of it as well. So they eventually got tired of the game.

That is a huge point. Dare I say, an xbox huge point. It tells me that people don’t just want to play with their friends – they want to do it at the speed of the fastest leveler in the group. Otherwise, it feels hollow. In other words, they want cake and a fork to eat it as well. Why? Because, as much as some people may cry out about how playing with their friendly group is their main preoccupation, they still have that little voice inside that comes up whenever they play the game in a way it’s not ‘supposed’ to be played.

At the risk of making a harsh, dogmatic statement, I’ll go for it: MMOs are, mainly, about progression. And when that progression is not performed, the player is not satisfied. Social gaming, graphics, story… all those things certainly do matter, but they’re all subject to progression. When you players in an MMO can’t progress, or choose not to progress as in this case, that’s when the game starts feeling hollow fast.

So for these well-meaning people (and I really do mean that), playing with their friends is just not enough, no matter how much they say it is. If they can’t do it *and* keep a normal flow of progression at the same time, it’s worthless. Cake + fork. Because, I imagine, if it was only about the social aspect… if it was about playing with your friends as the sole, exclusive reason for playing the game, then the issue of alts wouldn’t matter. If all you ever did in an MMO was to get a character to level 10, then delete it to make an alt, rinse and repeat forever, well then you should be having fun doing that as long as you do it with your friends, right? Because that’s what your there for. To play with your friends. If it doesn’t matter to you what classes or what gear your friends have, because they are your friends and you enjoy playing with them no matter what, then it should not matter to you to constantly have to either halt or restart your progress to keep up with a lagging friend. Hrm.

I still haven’t received a good reply for that one. So, let’s be a bit honest here. Yes. Of course playing with your friends is great. I’ve done so for a long time, and got tons of fun out of it. But maybe we should stop trying to modify progress mechanics for the sake of the laggers. Maybe we should start taking lagging in the chin, and not demand that other people’s progress be halted or rendered meaningless just so we can catch up. Yes, progress gaps happen. There are no ways around it, and it’s unfortunate. But the solution is not to screw other people over, I think. Maybe the solution is to just take one for the team.

That, or start being completely honest for a moment, and instead of saying that it’s just about playing with friends, it really is about the friends + progress as usual, something that cannot be realistically achieved if real life intersects.

This entry might sound harsher than it was really meant to be. I hold no disdain or hate for victims of the progress gap, seeing as how I’ve been a victim of it many times myself. But all I see from many of these people is the denouncing of the problem; not an overall, sweeping solution to the problem of progress gaps.

Yes, rest xp is good but some people don’t like it because they still have to ‘work’/'play’ to close the gap. Offline leveling is an original concept, but some people don’t like it because you don’t have much control over it, or it’s slow, or you don’t end up exactly where a player would have ended up had they played the character all that time. A sidekick/downgrade/stop xp gain has some merits, but it’s only a matter of time until those doing the downgrading get tired of it and want to get some actual progress done with their characters, instead of having to play in a way they don’t particularly care for the laggers’ sake.

Maybe there is no solution to progress gaps, and we just have to roll with the punch instead of coming up with solutions that alter other people’s experience due to our own problems.

They’re all looking for the LOTRO Hi-Res Texture Pack. As if I had it. Scratch that, as if I could ever download the darn thing. I’m not getting a 1.8 Gb file over this ridiculous “DSL”, as the brochure says.

However, let it never be said The Better Game is not out to help people. No sir. You can get said massive texture pack simply by heading over to lotro.allakhazam.com and getting it from there. Be warned, though, they want you to become a premium member. Whatever that is. But it’s there for download.

That means, stop bugging me. Over and out.

This delightful rant by Nicodemus over at KTR got my failing brain cells firing. I was sure I had written something in the same vein a while back, but couldn’t find it. Well, after braving ars’ search for a while, it came up. Well, here you go, reposted three years later in its entirety. I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to be as valid today as it was back then. Not much has changed at all.

The Craft and the Industry

This is a post about everything and nothing. You don’t have to be old (>30), but it helps because you know where we came from. You don’t have to be young (<16), but it helps because you’ll decide where we’re going.

In the beginning, there was Pong? Wrong. I’d bet my left nut–the heavier one, no less–that in the real beginning it was just two guys. Maybe they were hunters and maybe they were scouring the veldt looking for something to sink their teeth into. At some point, one of the guys must have bet to the other that he could hit that rock at 30 paces. Or that he could beat the other guy to that tree in the distance. The bet–the game–doesn’t matter. What matters is that there was one. Sure, later on this thing got co-opted. Hijacked, as it were, and we eventually ended up with Mayans playing pelota as a pre-sacrificial family activity, Romans with their circus and copious amounts of bread and Vandals getting together to see who could stick a spear in a hole on a tree while riding a horse in assless leather pants.

Even in our electronic age, Pong was not the beginning. Summer of ’66. Ralph Baer is waiting for a coworker at a bus stop and, to kill some time, writes down some notes on how to use home TV sets to play games. Take a look at this little blurb. It’s from Baer’s eventual original patent:

“The present invention pertains to an apparatus [and method], in conjunction with monochrome and color television receivers, for the generation, display, manipulation, and use of symbols or geometric figures upon the screen of the television receivers for the purpose of [training simulation, for] playing games [and for engaging in other activities] by one or more participants. The invention comprises in one embodiment a control unit, an apparatus connecting the control unit to the television receiver and in some applications a television screen overlay mask utilized in conjunction with a standard television receiver. The control unit includes the control, circuitry, switches and other electronic circuitry for the generation, manipulation and control of video signals which are to be displayed on the television screen. The connecting apparatus selectively couples the video signals to the receiver antenna terminals thereby using existing electronic circuits within the receiver to process and display the signals generated by the control unit in a first state of the coupling apparatus and to receive broadcast television signals in a second state of the coupling apparatus. An overlay mask which may be removably attached to the television screen may determine the nature of the game to be played or the training simulated. Control units may be provided for each of the participants. Alternatively, games [training simulations and other activities] may be carried out in conjunction with background and other pictorial information originated in the television receiver by commercial TV, closed-circuit TV or a CATV station.”

But, as well as that description may apply to the systems of today, it’s history. For the purposes of this issue, Pong is a starting point as good as any other. That’s our higher-order beginning as gamers, an arbitrary zero point in the timeline of electronic entertainment.

Pong was created by Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell in 1972 merely because it was a simple game to program. Later on that same year, Bushnell founded Atari. The rest is history.
Space Invaders was Toshihiro Nishikado’s child for Taito in 1978. It ended up causing a coin shortage in Japan due to its popularity.
Pac-Man? Namco designer Tohru Iwatani went out for the evening with some friends and saw a pizza with a slice missing. Pac-Man went to become the best-selling coin-operated game in history (over $100 million in 20 years @ 25 cents a pop).
Elite? Bell and Braben were 19 years old. Teenagers that taught themselves asm. Programmed the game half in their spare time, half under Acornsoft’s tutelage. Elite turned out to be an icon of gaming, still never surpassed after 20 years.
Shigeru Miyamoto was 27 in 1982 when he created Donkey Kong, without ever creating a video game before and without knowing how to program. He got the idea from travelling puppet shows during his childhood.
John Carmack thought Wolf 3D’s engine could be better (how surprising of him). DOOM launches at the end of 1993. An estimated fifteen million copies have been downloaded or passed from player to player on disk or online. It kickstarts the 3D era and changes the face of gaming from that point on.

Where am I going with all this? It was a craft. It wasn’t the cranking of the hype machine via websites, misleading press releases and dubious previews. Games and genres were not created according to market projections or needs. Instead, games and genres created their new markets themselves. It was one or two guys, talented or not, with a good idea and the drive to realize it. Maybe in a basement, maybe in an apartment, maybe between classes at school, maybe in an office. The ideas came from the creator’s minds and not from the need to satisfy the particular and fleeting hunger of the market. There wasn’t an area that you could point to and say “Oops, there’s a niche market. Stay away”. They were all niche markets. Considering the limitations of the hardware during those times, content was all you really had, and it was created accordingly. Mechanics were simple, but groundbreaking and refined. Since neither graphics nor sound could take the player to the level of the experience envisioned by the creators, it had to be done with content. It had to be done with originality. It had to be done with solid and innovative mechanics and concepts. With such severe and asphyxiating medium limitations, the intangibles, the meta-elements were what defined the experience.

But I’m not seeing the past with rose-colored glasses. All that doesn’t mean that there were no stinkers. All that doesn’t mean that every game was a classic. All that doesn’t mean that all games were better.

And yes, all that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an industry surrounding the craft, working pretty much as it does today. Bell and Braben pitched Elite first to Thorn EMI, which in turn sent them a rejection later which said, quote: “‘The game needs three lives, it needs to play through in no more than about 10 minutes, users will not be prepared to play for night after night to get anywhere, people won’t understand the trading, they don’t understand 3D, the technology’s all very impressive but it’s not very colourful’”. Can I get a truckload of rolleyes, please? It’s cheaper in bulk.

Sure enough, almost inevitably, the industry grew alongside the craft. However, at some point–I’m gonna place it in the early/mid 90′s–, something happened: The industry began to replace the craft. Until that point, the industry was necessary to move, sell and promote the creations of the craft. After that point, the industry replaced the craft as creators. Fewer and fewer games were created from original individual ideas, while more and more games were created in meeting rooms in response to market estimates. With the industry beginning to finance the creations, it began to hold direct control over them. Ideas that may have started as one thing ended up being quite different. Deadlines began to be enforced–regardless of the actual state of the product–because time is money.

As the complexity and capabilities of the hardware continued its relentless advance, so did the games’. Suddenly, games need to be made by small armies of people if they were to be finished (hopefully, at least) on time. Gone were the care and the refinement that the creators imprinted their creations with. Individuality and originality began to be viewed as an investment risk, and who wants to take a risk with games beginning to cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to create? To meet financial deadlines, creation was relabeled as production and the product had to be out of the door no matter its state. Games began to be killed even before seeing the light of day.

Is this a rant against the industry? Not at all. The industry is a necessity. It always was. It serves an essential role. But what I contend is that, just as the craft can’t sell as effectively as the industry, the industry can’t create as effectively as the craft. Ideally, the relationship should be symbiotic: The craft creates, the industry sells. Dandy. But at some point, the industry overstepped its bounds. At some point, the industry overtook the creation. You wanna know who facilitated that?

We did.

We’re a fickle lot by nature. Our collective attention span can be measured in angstroms. We just have to have the next best thing. Now. No, not when it’s done. Now. The next best thing needs to have better graphics than the old one, otherwise it’s crap. It needs to have better and more music, otherwise it’s crap. We literally can’t wait until it’s done. We have to have it. More, more, more. And since less, less, less doesn’t sell, the industry reacts accordingly. And screw gameplay. Sure, we go on and on with the “gameplay over graphics” bit, but if it doesn’t come glitzier than the old one it’s crap. We can’t possibly demand fifty AAA titles per year and not expect that many of them will turn up crap. And then we bitch. Our demands have a lot to do with games costing millions of dollars to make. Our demands have a lot to do with games being killed or maimed while stillborn. Our demands have a lot to do with the release of unfinished games.

This is really not an attack on the industry. It’s an attack on what the situation has become and what the situation is doing to gaming. Current and future gaming. There is a difference between making money by creating games and creating games to make money. It’s subtle, but it’s situated at the root of the problem.

So, if we want better games, how do we get out of this pickle? This is something that, I think, can be solved by everybody. Craft, industry and gamers. We all make what we call gaming. As such, everybody can do things to improve the state of affairs.
The craft? Be honest. To yourselves, to your creation and to the gamers. Stay true to your vision and defend it at all costs. Originality should always trump convenience. Innovation shouldn’t be done for its own sake.
The industry? Respect the creation. Do what you do best: Selling, not creating. Advising, not controlling. Support the craft, do not attempt to replace it. Allow time. Allow originality. Allow refinement. Stand by what you sell. Take risks.
The gamers? Value quality over quantity. Vote with your money, not in an onscreen forum poll. Do not be afraid to try new things. Support the craft and the industry. Learn to wait. Learn that enjoying does not mean consuming.

The industry is not all bad, the craft is not all good and the gamers are not all fickle. But most are. I am most definitely not yet another old fart, longing for greener and older pastures of gaming. What interests me is the future. And the future that I see is, unfortunately, a little bit sad unless we change things in each of our own areas. I see a future without a possible new Donkey Kong because the possible new Miyamoto was forced to churn clone game after clone game. I see a future without a possible new Elite because the possible Bells and Brabens are told that complicated games without 3 lives are a risk. I see a future without a possible new Doom because the possible new Carmack spends his time feeding a market need instead of creating a breakthrough.

And I better stop here before I get into another Jerry Maguire-ish moment. Discuss. Give me ideas. Give me solutions. Give me comments.

——–

(original here)

Came across a small, player-made collection of shots from LOTRO using the hi-res texture pack available on the pre-order DVD. Looks very, very nice. The difference can be subtle, but it’s there. Personal favorites: 4, 7, 13, 14.

According to floon from Turbine, the pack in question is “… a few gigs of textures”, hence the reason it’s included in the DVD and not available as a download (afaik, at least).

Wonder if it would trash to HD too much if I try it on my old TNT2.