A Hellivator to Heaven: Adventures in Terraria

I just finished building my first Hellivator. It is a modest one, comprised of a 3-block wide shaft with periodic wooden platforms spaced roughly before my fall damage threshold. Some torches light the path downward. And I still need to go back through and tweak the spacing of a few platforms, as I take a bit of damage when riding my express wonka-vator all the way down to the fiery underworld. But it sure beats crawling through the dangerous labyrinth of tunnels and passages I hollowed out so much longer ago. 

But now that I'm down here, amidst the lava pools and demons, I'm wondering what to do next. And so it goes with Terraria.

The Snowball and the Steamroller: Fundamental Challenges in 4X Game Design

4X games are predicated on exploring some unknown geography, expanding your control into newly discovered regions, exploiting resources from those regions, and using those resources to build up forces and exterminate your opponents (who are trying to do the same to you!). Typically, 4X games aim to convey the machinations of entire empires, and hence have a large geographic scale in mind.  

This basic premise of large-scale empires fighting for resource control to fuel a military domination struggle creates some fundamental challenges for 4X game design, which has been central to whole quest to make the net big 4X game to live up to Master of Orion 2’s legacy.  I covered some of the failings of 4X games in an earlier post, A Failure to End, but want to expand on some of those points in this post. As I see it, the challenges are inter-related, but stem from a set of relatively simple issues:

- Issue #1 - City Spam & Snowballing
- Issue #2 - “One Big Battle” and the Steamroller
- Issue #3 - Micromanagement, Tedium, and Drag-out

These three issues are, I feel, the central challenge of 4X game design. And how the design of different games in the genre handles (or fails to handle) this interlinked challenge does as much to differentiate titles as to account for a game’s overall success, failure, or lasting legacy.

Edit: The awesome crew over at eXplorminate covered this topic from the perspective of the "endgame" experience: The 4X Endgame and its Follies and their article is also worth looking at in light of this fundamental challenge perspective.

On Game Obsessions, Disillusionments, and Finding Meaning

Alec Meer, over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, wrote an interesting personal piece looking back on 2014 and thinking ahead about 2015. In the article, he touched on both his expanding life role as a father – a demanding reality I can sympathize with – as well as how games fit within the broader context of life pursuits and bring (or fail to bring) memorable value. He also raises a concern over the mindless nature of some games, which seem to lure us in with a promise of freedom and a world of wonder but deliver something far less thrilling.

Alec Meer Wrote:
“I have a strong suspicion I spent too much time with too many games which use the Assassin’s Creed structure – the map full of icons, each pinpointing exactly where the next known quantity was, each one closing the door on having an experience which felt in any way personal. It’s a simulacrum of freedom – really, you’re in a theme park, repeating a sanitized and mechanical experience. You know exactly what’s where, exactly what’s going to happen, exactly how it’s going to feel.

The time passes pleasantly, maybe even thrillingly at times, but it means nothing, there’s no sense of achievement other than Achievements. Maybe it’s more compulsive masturbation than Disneyland (or maybe Disneyland is masturbation? Discuss) – make the itch go away, risk a faint sense of guilt and self-disgust afterwards, then do it again anyway.“

Starbase Orion: The Brightest Star of All

Note that this review was originally published for iOS Board Games on July 24th, 2013.

The Pre-Ramble
The 4X space game genre – eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate for those scratching their heads – has in many ways been a problematic genre. Fans of the genre hold Master of Orion II, a game from 1996, in exceedingly high regard; and rightfully so. MoO2 struck a fantastic balance between complexity, level of detail (or micromanagement), meaningful player choice, and strategic diversity. For decades, designers and developers have been chasing the dream of making the “next” Master of Orion game – and there has been no shortage of valiant attempts.

While a great many games have been developed and released to varying levels of success, an undercurrent among fans is that there hasn’t been a title that quite got the right mix of elements. Each game draws its criticisms: too much or not enough emphasis on combat; lack of diplomacy or other non-military mechanisms; too much (or too little) micromanagement. The list of critiques goes on…

Starbase Orion, by its own admission, is an iOS 4X game intended to be a spiritual offspring of Master of Orion II - AND designed to be imminently playable in multiplayer formats. A lofty goal! So how well does it reach it? This review will take an in-depth look at the game, where it is successful – and most importantly why gamers, including boardgamers, should take a good look at Starbase Orion.

2014 Synopsis and Highlight Reel

So doing these end of year wrap-ups appears  to be a thing – so I better get on board lest I be accused of not doing the right things!

2014 has been a bit of a transitional year. Family changes (these things called babies and kids) has made breaking away from the home front an evening of boardgame debauchery a wee bit more challenging – driving me back into the hovel of PC and iOS gaming a bit more. Sadly though, within this hovel, I found myself bombarded with far too many seasonal sales of tempting digital goods for my own well-being. Steam seasonal sales, the Touch Arcade iOS app tracker (with sales notifications!), Humble Bundle sales (lord help me), and the ever-present GOG.com (nostalgia runs deep with this one!) has made sure that my wallet feels the cruel bite at regular intervals.

So given all of this, what have I picked up? What’s worth special attention? What have I actually been playing? What do I wish I was playing? What should I have played but didn’t? Well good friends, read on if you dare!

The Stars My Destination – An Armada 2526 Retrospective

The quest for an exemplary space 4X game feels like chasing a ghost. Just when you think you have it captured, it glides through your fingers and disappears back into the closest. Or under the rug. Or whether else spectral spirits like to go.

You see, we 4X gamers are a fickle bunch and are knowingly unwilling to have our cake not be able to eat it. The cake, by the way, is a deliciously complex and multilayered affair – and the act of eating it is to be wrapped up in an amazing and evocative space opera while simultaneously getting our deep strategic gameplay fix. Unfortunately these dueling desires are at often at odds with one another. So the poor schmucks charged with creating these games are left in a sort of limbo state where it is hard to satisfy the fan base across all of their clamoring, confounded demands.

If its sounds like I’m ripping on 4X fans – I assure you I’m one of them too, embattled in my own internal conflict between wanting a wondrous narrative to open up before my eyes while also taking no substitutes for challenging strategic gameplay. I have a pet theory that there are in fact two camps or mindsets among 4X gamers:

Camp 1: 4X gamers that are drawn to the simulation aspects of watching their empires grow and unfold over a long period of time, at an epic scale, and at relatively relaxed pace.

Camp 2: 4X gamers that are drawn to interesting, consequential, and challenging strategic decisions where players are fully in control and games play out in a competitive and concise manner with lots of varied strategies to pursue and refine.

It’s possible (even likely) that any individual 4X gamer will have a hand or foot in both of these camps at the same time. And while not strictly speaking opposites, the gameplay and design implications of satisfying the two camps are often at odds. What makes a game more appealing from a simulation and narrative perspective tends to make it overwrought and weakens the strategic dimension of the game.

What’s a 4X gamer to do?

The Player’s Point of View: Theme and Framing the Experience

So a while ago I started a Google spreadsheet file dubbed the “Game Tracker,” wherein I keep list of games that I’m interested in playing in the future. As the list grew and grew; and then grew some more – in concert with my available time shrinking and shrinking; and then shrinking some more – putting the games into an assortment of buckets so that I could prioritize my interest among like-seeming games became important. But hold onto this thought!

Now rewind back two years (give or take) when I was working more actively on the Game Genome Project. If you need a refresher, the Game Genome Project is a BGG guild comprised of various individuals looking to develop a nomenclature and/or classification scheme for boardgames. The basic premise of the project is this:

The Game Genome Project is a comprehensive and collaborative effort to identify the full range of traits (aka genes or characteristics) that can be used to describe board games along with the corresponding tools and practices for assessing and assigning these traits to individual games. The purpose of these activities is to provide the board game community with a more effective and commonly understood lexicon (vocabulary) for discussing board games and support analytical investigation of the boardgaming hobby.

One of the “traits” to investigate relates to the theme of a game, and we quickly arrived at two major distinctions: the theme as it relates to mechanics (level of abstraction vs. fidelity), and the theme itself as a subject and frame of reference for the experience. Theme as it relates to mechanics is a highly fascinating topic, and will be covered in more detail in the future. Till then, and to satiate your burning desires, I’ll direct your attention to this most excellent post by qwertymartin: How do you wear your theme sir?

As for theme as subject and frame of reference, there are a few key dimensions we considered: Scope, Setting, and Subject (yes, I deliberately made them all s-words!). To discuss how these work and apply, I’m going to bring us back to my little “Game Tracker” conundrum and see how these dimensions of defining a game’s theme might be used as a frame for understanding different experiences. Here we go!

Culture Storms and the Evolving Medium of Games

I’ve been wanting to write something on the culture storm within the video gaming community that’s been brewing and raging over the past many months. On one hand, I’ve stayed relatively silent on the issue because it hasn’t been clear how best I, and this blog, would make a useful contribution to what has become a total quagmire of internet vitriol. On the other hand, my own thoughts are sufficiently confused on the subject that writing about it at least forces me to articulate the thoughts I do have and try to work towards resolution in my own mind. It’s therapeutic on some level.

The culture storm I’m talking about is related to #GamerGate. If you are aware of the controversy, you probably have some of our own opinions and thoughts. If you haven’t heard of it – wikpedia’s GamerGate article appears to provide a fairly detailed account of the issues in play. I’ve taken to calling this a “storm,” as opposed to a war or conflict, because I think it’s far messier than what a war with cleanly divided sides might suggest.

Ultimately though, I don’t want to talk about #GamerGate directly. My feelings, after reading far too much (from both sides), is that trying to sort out the root causes, motivations, and rationales for pro-GG and anti-GG camps is like trying to fight your way through Minos’ Labyrinth. Except instead of facing the Minotaur you face a never-ending stream of photo collages of retrospective twitter posts, the authenticity and context of which is routinely unclear or absent. Its total confusion on both sides of the fence, with the extreme contingents on both sides screaming conspiracy, causing whatever facts or salient points might have been raised in the middle ground to be completely lost. Phew!

So, I’m not talking about #GamerGate. If you are looking for another voice, Erik Kain wrote a nice piece back in September that encapsulates my frustrations with the whole situation rather eloquently. Instead, I want to focus on the issues that have come out of the controversy that ARE important topics to discuss relative to the health and future of gaming culture and industry overall.

You are probably asking “what are these ‘issues’ that we can pull out from the fire and talk about?” I’ll frame each one below, and try my best to frame the different perspectives that come into play on each, and then include some of my own thoughts based on my own experiences and what I’d like to see happen.

All Roads Lead to Amber

So has anyone read Roger Zelazny's Amber novels? For those that haven't, or need a refresher, here is the gist:

The Chronicles of Amber is a 10 book sequence split into 2 parts. Part 1 was written between '70 and '78. And Part 2 was written between '85 and '91. These are fantasy novels set in an alternate reality, of which Earth as we know it exists as one of many different worlds/realms. The basic universe exists as a sort of continuum between chaos and order, with the Courts of Chaos and the Logrus on one end and Amber and the Pattern on the other. All of reality is spread between these two poles.

The stories are quite engrossing and all 10 books are about as long as one book from the Games of Thrones (for reference). The major plots revolve around various Lords and Ladies of Amber (or Chaos) going about their power grabs in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The books mostly focus on the political intrigues and dynamics between the characters, and not the usual fantasy trappings - its almost the progenitor for something like the Game of Thrones in that regard. But better and more concise in my opinion.

Other than a rather odd (diceless apparently!) RPG set in the Amber universe, there haven't been many games using the Amber setting (although I've heard rumors of it being difficult to license). This is about to change!

Fall-time Spectacular: The State of the Blog!

It's been too long right? I know, I know, you are wondering, where has he been!? The answer my friends is that I've been here, just not writing as much as I've been intending to. In fact, I'm starring at a virtual stack of half-finished term papers ... err blog posts ... that I'd love get finished and submitted to the interwebz professors; but life has been hectic lately. I'm sure you've all been there.

Part of me is also a little torn about what direction in which to take the blog. One thing I'd like to do is have more frequent blog posts, which of course requires me to actually write blog posts more frequently. This conundrum is somewhat at odds with the fact that I haven't had a lot of extra time lately in which to write said blog posts (hence the lack of posts over the past few months). Sigh, it is a circular and terrible circumstance. What to do?