Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in video games.

Desperate Gods, by Wolfire Games, is a virtual board game made for Fuck This Jam; you have a bunch of virtually simulated tokens and cards, but you must process and execute the game rules yourself. You can easily cheat, but then what's the point?

DG is not the first game or toolset to do this, although it's certainly the most polished and nicest looking so far. LackeyCCG, for instance, gives you a deck builder, a table, some tools for keeping track of state, then walks away and lets you get to it. The rationale, from their FAQ:

Q: Does LackeyCCG force people to follow a CCG's rules? Will it allow me to do something that isn't legal?
A: LackeyCCG does not implement rules forcing. I have tried other methods of playing CCGs online and I have found that forcing rules adherence just serves to bog down the game and makes it much less fun to play. Lackey allows you to simplify your turn when not much interesting is happen (so you can get to the more fun parts of a game faster). LackeyCCG will allow you to do anything you could do if you were playing with real cards. It also allows for a more formal adherence to the rules if you want to play that way, but it doesn't force any particular play style.

On why Convo is now a WW2 spy romance, and the myth of psychological realism in fiction.

Short version: I've chickened out, a bit. Long version?

To make some sort of procedural "anything", you have to have an idea of what the building blocks of that "anything" are, or at least what you'll argue they are -- and then either frame your game in those terms or expressly simulate those terms. So if Convo is a game about narrative instead of people, then what's a unit of narrative?

From there, my thinking goes like this...

Dear Esther postpartum, by Robert Briscoe.

Rob Briscoe has put-out a really heart-felt, personal, death-defying postpartum on Dear Esther.

I think if you ask the vast majority of career game developers out there (or anyone, really) what they're worried about -- it's probably money.

It's industry developers without any job security or a job, where shipping a title means the publisher will force layoffs to improve their quarterly financials. It's the average indies who glare at their monthly 3 figure check from their meager sales, assuming it's even that much, and wonder what that'll buy after rent.

Briscoe had to sacrifice a lot and felt poised to fail throughout the entire process, even though everyone was telling him that Dear Esther was going to do well. Given popular depictions of game development, it seems success comes to those who risk everything to the point of emotional breakdown.

Can we, in good conscience, recommend careers in game development (AAA or indie) to the uninitiated when our passions often lead to the verge of self-destruction? I guess you never hear about the developers with stable lives, happy families, and financial security -- their lives aren't stories -- but isn't it scary to think that passion can easily lead to hell instead of the good life?

Dishonored's narrative design: how The Heart lies to you.

(UPDATE: this interview at RPS with Arkane devs confirms that not only was I right, but that it was also a very conscious decision on their part to make it do that, wow.)

Dishonored does a lot of things with game narrative (abstract dream levels, scripted body awareness, lots of readables, overheard conversations, scripted sequences, branching missions changing based on player decisions) which fit neatly into the existing immersive sim / first person toolbox that we're used to. It's well-done, but it's not particularly new or anything.

The Heart is something slightly different, though, and I found it surprisingly subtle and ironic.

Level design / character SPOILERS (but no plot SPOILERS) below:

Convo and "what do simulations simulate?"

Simulations are simplified systems that have some semblance to the real world. The decrease in complexity, the ways in which the simulation is different from the actual thing, is called the "simulation gap."

In games, I argue that players never forget they're playing a game or simulation, but they're willing to suspend their disbelief and ignore the gap to enjoy themselves more. I think the term "immersion" in the sense of "forgetting you're playing a game", then, mischaracterizes this dynamic and implies the simulation is all-encompassing and consumes the player, when really, it's important that games are NOT holodecks and it's a good thing that they aren't.

As designers, one of our jobs is to "sell the simulation gap" and make it an asset instead of a liability.

Why Frog Fractions is one of the best games of 2012.

First, you really should play Frog Fractions right now.

My SPOILER-y thoughts are after the jump.

"Zobeide" at Playing The Game, 27-28 October in Milan

I'm fixing up Zobeide / adding a few features for yet another Lunarcade event, this time at "Playing The Game" in Milan from 27-28 October at Spazio O' Artoteca. If you're around, then you should attend, if for no other reason than to play XRA's mesmerizing "Memory of a Broken Dimension."

Machine translated website copy (from Italian to English) is after the jump:

Talking about Convo.

Figuring out how to talk about your game is part of designing your game -- so trying to explain Convo to various people has been extremely helpful in refining my design goals.

My favorite version so far has been, "it's an attempt to make The Sims accessible for hardcore gamers."

The argument is that social simulations like The Sims and Prom Week are actually really complicated systems, more complicated than most supposedly "hardcore" games -- like, I tried playing Prom Week again the other day, and couldn't understand how to achieve anything because each character has a dozen abilities and a dozen moods and a dozen relationships. It seemed like a brute force approach to simulation, to dissect the gamut of human feeling and then to directly design and represent each facet. Don't even get me started on how much stuff is in The Sims... it's all very fascinating, but it's also really intimidating.

But take something like XCOM -- I really like how there are just 3 core verbs (move, shoot, overwatch) that produce a variety of situations. However, the player stories consist mostly of "my squad was in danger and we survived" or "we got massacred" or stuff along those lines. I don't think XCOM's relatively limited range of emergent narratives come from its limited verb set; I think they come from the premise of its simulation, a military squad battling aliens. What if we replaced that premise with, uh, the mundane but thrilling dramas of everyday life?

"My bros were in danger but one chatted up a really hot girl, but then she started talking about particle physics which he knew nothing about, so I had him text his friend about particle physics so he could talk to her instead. Turns out, they both hated plaid."

Other elevator pitches:

• "It's like XCOM plus Jersey Shore."
• "It's about applied linguistics and binge drinking."
• "It's like XCOM plus Love Actually."