Adventure Time!  Or at least it was.  Two weeks ago, Fantastic Arcade and Juegos Rancheros teamed up with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward to create the first ever Adventure Time Game Jam.  Although the 48-hour event took place in Austin, Texas, the organizers took the jam online to include developers all over the world.  I was fortunate enough to be able to participate and make my own Adventure Time game.  I decided to use Flixel once again, since I’m starting to get the hang of working with it.  This time, however, I decided to go for a top-down Zelda-style game, which seemed to fit the style of the show.

For the most part, the first day of the jam went smoothly.  Although I had only ever used Flixel for making platform games, it was easy enough to convert to a top-down format.  In fact, the most time consuming part was having to create four different walking animations for all the characters.  In any case, after a few hours, I had Finn walking around in an abstract blue maze.  I actually kind of liked the blue maze, and considered making a game set in Lumpy Space, just so I could use it.  In the end, however, I decided to place the game in the Grasslands, giving it a slightly more generic adventure-game feel.

After creating a basic tileset for the Grasslands, I started working on enemies and combat.  Once again, sword combat was quite a bit different than the ranged combat I had used in previous games, so it took quite a bit of tweaking to get it working properly.  The biggest problem was getting the animation and the actual contact area for the sword swing to match up close enough.  I had originally hoped to include multiple swords in the game, and had considered making the sword animation separate from the Finn animation.  In the end, I ended up combining them for the sake of simplicity.  The downside is that when you swing your sword, the animation of the blade doesn’t extend very far (Compare this with Link to the Past, where a sword swing extends out as wide as your character’s whole body).  Finn’s hitbox is quite a bit smaller than his actual sprite, so the sword combat actually ended  up working pretty well.  Still, a more complex sword animation would have allowed the player to more easily gauge his range during combat.

The first enemy I created to test combat was a skeleton.  Even though it worked pretty well as a starting enemy, it seemed a bit out of place in the grassy fields.  I decided to make a second tileset for dungeons and caves, where the skeleton would fit in a bit better.  The dungeon tileset ended up taking more time than any other part of the project, not because it was particularly difficult, but because I got a bit carried away with it.  By the time I decided to stop (at which point I think I only had 12 hours left), I had not only dungeon and cave walls, but a large range of arches, gargoyles, altars, banners and shelves.  I had so many tiles, in fact, that a lot of them didn’t even make it into my final level designs.

With the skeletons now relegated to the dungeon, I had to create a new enemy for the Grassland.  I decided to make a Grass Ogre, based off the character Donny from the show.  Although bigger and slower, they otherwise had the same AI as the skeletons.  To liven things up a bit, I decided to add some Bug Bats to the dungeon.  I also created a stronger “Meat Ogre” to serve as a sort of miniboss.

At this point, however, I was starting to run out of time.  Even though I had intended to have the characters rescuing princesses or something similar, I decided that it was time to stop adding features and get the game polished up.  I hastily closed off the paths to uncompleted levels, polished up my triggers for switching between levels, and created a basic HUD display so that you could tell how much health you had left.  Since the princesses had been cut (I really wanted Lumpy Space Princess to make an appearance), I didn’t yet have an objective for the game.  Just as the jam was ending, I stuck a treasure chest in the dungeon and a second in the cave, and Adventure Time:  The Quest for the Two Chests was born!

In total, the game jam created around a hundred different games, ranging from text adventures to iPad apps.  When it finally came around to handing out prizes, the organizers pulled out all the stops.  The team behind the winning game, Adventure Minute, was given a crossbow hand crafted by Iolo the Bard and presented by Lord British himself.  That’s pretty hard to top.  Sadly, my game didn’t win a prize, but it was still easily the best game jam I’ve ever been a part of.

Much of the credit for the game jam’s success can be given to its organizers.  Despite being in charge of a large, high-profile event with some pretty impressive prizes, they managed to stay fairly laid-back.  They were very flexible on questions of reusing assets and code, as well as on the final deadline.  The latter was particularly helpful for me, since my eight-month-old son decided to have a tantrum somewhere around hour 47.  In fact, though I was able to pack in all my last-minute editions before the deadline, I ended up breaking my build (which, admittedly, wasn’t nearly as bad as my last-minute problem last year).  Fortunately, rather than freezing submissions when time ran out, the organizers gave the developers 12 more hours to get their submissions in, allowing us to fix any lingering bugs.  I was able to put my son to bed and come back a few hours later, debug the program and submit.  For a game jam, this event was surprisingly low-stress.

The other aspect of the game jam that made it so amazing was the use of Brett Chalupa’s BMO content management system.  BMO (or the Beautiful Mess Organizer) is a platform currently being developed expressly for the purpose of hosting game jams like this one.  It made the process of signing up for the jam and submitting the final project simple and painless.  What really made this game jam great, however, was the addition of an update feed for the developers.  Throughout the event, people were posting images of their games, animation samples and more.  Between the updates people posted on BMO and the conversation that was already happening on twitter, I felt a greater sense of community and collaboration than I’ve felt at other game jams when all the developers are in the same room.

Some of my favorite games to come out of the jam were Noire Time, a short point-and-click adventure with beautiful art, Lumpy Space Chess, an abstract board game of sorts, and Legend of Finn, a very polished platformer after the style of The Lost Vikings.  I particularly enjoyed the latter, as it was a good example of what a well-balanced team can achieve in a short time.  Besides having very solid gameplay, the game had beautiful artwork (being able to spend three hours on Marceline’s attack animation was totally worth it) and awesome music.  Since developers were posting updates on BMO throughout the competition, I was able to see the progress of many of these games over the course of two days, which was pretty neat.

The Adventure Time Game Jam was different than many other game jams I’ve done in a number of ways.  It was considerably higher profile than any of the local ones I’ve entered.  Both Venus Patrol and Wired featured my game in their coverage of the event, which was definitely new for me.  Another amazing aspect of the game jam is that it keeps getting better.  New features keep getting added to the BMO system and even though the competition is over, developers continue to add new levels and features to their games.  Maybe this way I’ll get around to finishing my 8-bit Adventure Time theme or my NPC code (I think my game could definitely use more Lumpy Space Princess).  In any case, I have a feeling I’ll be keeping an eye on this jam for a long time to come.

Also, if you haven’t played The Quest for the Two Chests yet, you should go check it out.

Filed under: Game Dev, Indie Games by Pete
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Generally, we tend to think about things like narrative, history and storytelling in terms of time.  Many forms of media favor this kind of temporal logic.  When we watch a movie, we sit down and watch as the story unfolds before us in real-time.  This is not to say that filmmakers are locked into a simple one-to-one relationship with time in the real world.  Early on, filmmakers figured out ways of manipulating our perceptions of time, using techniques like montage and even simple cuts to convey the passage of large amounts of time in a few seconds, or to take a single moment and let it linger on the screen.  Nevertheless, the passage of time in the story world is linked to the passage of time in our own.

With videogames, however, there is a different paradigm in narrative progression.  A few weeks ago, Emily Bembeneck posted an interesting article on Play the Past about the importance of space in our perceptions of videogame narrative.  Indeed, a number of videogame scholars have noted the relationship between space and narrative within the virtual space of a game.   Artist and media theorist Lev Manovich has stated that in many games, “narrative and time itself are equated with the movement through 3D space, the progression through rooms, levels, or words.”¹ I would suggest that this tendency toward spatial logic is a characteristic of videogames as a medium.

So what exactly does it mean to equate movement through space with time and narrative?  In her article, Emily gives the example of the game King’s Quest VI.  As in most point-and-click adventure games, the gameplay focuses around exploring different areas, collecting items and interacting with characters.  As she points out, players generally mark their progression through the narrative by “where” they are in the game.  The further the player has moved from the starting room, the further along she is in the story.  Further cues are provided by changes in these spaces.  Is that cloud of fire still hanging over Death Mountain?  Is there a vine hanging from the Cheese Bridge?  Is it still raining outside?  All of these environmental changes signal to the player that time has moved forward within the game world.

While this spatial logic of narrative progression is certainly not the only way that videogames can convey a story, it is a method that they are particularly suited for.  Moreover, this makes videogames a medium specially suited to helping us look at things from a different perspective.  Emily has already mentioned how spatial thinking applies to archeology, but there are many other fields in which such a perspective could be productive.  Indeed, with the “spatial turn” in the humanities, many scholars over the years have begun to shift their mode of thinking away from the temporal and toward the spatial.

While I definitely think that there’s a lot of really interesting possibilities for taking advantage of spatial thinking in game design, I also think that there’s a lot of untapped potential for temporal thinking in games.

“But wait!” you say, “Aren’t there at least as many real-time games as there are turn-based games?”

That’s not exactly the distinction I’m trying to get at.  I’m not merely talking about how the game progresses from one moment to the next, though that’s not an entirely unrelated question.  The question I want to know is what underlying game mechanics drive the player’s perception of story and narrative progression.  Even though a game might have real-time action, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the story and the game world itself are being driven by temporal game mechanics.  Take a game like Half-Life 2.  It’s certainly no coincidence that Gordon Freeman’s journey to the citadel always takes him about three days, nor is it a coincidence that he always ends up in the creepy town of Ravenholm after dark.  Obviously, there is no way to visit Ravenholm during the day, because the night sky is part of the map itself.  The player’s perception of time is dependent upon her movement through the various virtual spaces of the game, designed spatially to convey the narrative of Freeman’s three-day journey.

When talking about time-driven narratives, I should also note that I’m not necessarily refering to time-themed narratives.  Time travel is a fairly common theme in videogames.  In some games, like Final Fantasy or The Lost Vikings, it makes little difference to the gameplay itself.  In others, like Day of the Tentacle or Chrono Trigger, the game mechanics revolve around the ability to manipulate causality by interacting with the world in different time periods.  However, all of these games still rely on a primarily spatial logic when it comes to narrative progression.  If you never move your character, time never really passes.  Once again, time is functionally equated with movement.

So what does a game with a temporal logic look like?  An extreme example of this kind of design is Animal Crossing.  Perhaps the most unusual feature of Animal Crossing is the fact that time in the game world is synched to the real world through the console’s internal clock.  Thus, even when you’re not playing, time is effectively still passing in the game world, the effects of which can be seen the next time you play.  The grass will have grown, trees will have fruited, and residents of your town may have even moved away.  In Animal Crossing, you don’t need to move to have the game world progress and change.  In fact, you don’t even need to leave the game running.

Of course, if filmmakers aren’t limited to a one-to-one relationship between real-time and narrative-time, game makers are even less constrained.  Many designers have experimented with temporal mechanics in more creative ways.  Perhaps one of the best known examples of this is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  It was the first game in the series to feature a day and night cycle that was independent of player movement (although time only passed this way in certain areas of the game world).  While the game as a whole followed a much more spatial logic, the day and night cycle was not wholly an aesthetic feature.  Nightfall in the wilderness heralded the appearance of monsters and signaled town to raise its drawbridge.  Although this was rarely more than a momentary inconvenience for the player, it gave the game world a sense of life beyond the player’s interactions.

This experiment in temporal thinking was taken to new levels in the game’s sequel, Majora’s Mask.  The passage of time became universal, even passing while the player was in a dungeon.  It was also no longer just the monsters that responded to the passage of time.  Many of the character in Majora’s Mask move about and interact with each other without being prompted by the player.  Much of the game revolves around discovering what these NPCs are doing and trying to intervene in order to shape the outcomes of these events.

The potential of this kind of design first struck me when I first ran across one of the local shopkeepers getting mugged near the city gate.  The thief took ran off with his stolen goods and escaped before I had a chance to do anything.  My input as a player neither initiated the event, nor did it really effect the outcome.  Although I did eventually manage to go back and stop the robbery (Majora’s Mask is another time travel game, after all), the fact that these events happened on their own made it feel like the game world was populated by actual characters, rather than merely animated signposts, as NPCs often are.

Again, the relationship between videogames and narrative is much more complicated than a simple scale between temporal logic and spatial logic.  They are not mutually exclusive and they are not the only ways of telling a story.  Still, the more that we’re aware of these mechanics as designers, the more we can use them to take advantages of videogames’ inherent strengths as a medium.

References

1.  The Language of New Media.  Lev Manovich.

Filed under: Game Design, Narrative by Pete
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As most denizens of the Internet are well aware, one of the fiercest and most public battles over Internet freedom in the United States was fought at the beginning of the year.  I am, of course, referring to the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA.  Both bills were supposedly designed to combat copyright infringement overseas, but granted broad powers that would have made it possible to censor the Internet to a greater extent than ever before.  The justification for this legislation according to the MPAA, one of the major backers of these bills, is that downloading copyrighted material is theft and that loss in profits means the loss of American jobs.¹

Fortunately, through the combined protests of much of the Tech Industry and countless netizens, the bills suffered a devastating defeat.  The harsh and unexpected backlash to the legislation has left many in Washington shaken and unwilling to go out on a limb on any other bills that could be seen as trying to censor the Internet.  While this turn is in many ways a good thing for advocates of Internet freedom, nothing in politics is ever that simple.

One of the central questions to the debate over Internet freedom and censorship is the nature of copyright infringement.  Entertainment lobbyists, such as the MPAA and the RIAA, deliberately conflate the copying and distribution of copyrighted material with theft.  Clearly, copying is not theft.  Even the Supreme Court agrees on that point:

…interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.²

Nevertheless, distributing digital material over the Internet is most often discursively constructed as being the same as stealing physical goods.  We talk about these phenomena in terms of “IP theft” and “software piracy,” often justified with the concept of the “lost sale.”  While the idea that everyone who illegally downloads a song or movie over the Internet would otherwise have bought it is fairly ridiculous, it is a metaphor people understand.  People are comfortable with the creation, sale and theft of physical items.  It’s harder for people to make judgements based on the complex relationships between things like creative input, virtual labor, and computer code.  But then again, that’s what metaphors are for – keeping things simple so that we can understand them.  So, if the idea of “copying as theft” encourages people to pay for their entertainment through legitimate channels, it’s not doing any harm…right?

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Sean Lawson on cybersecurity discourse.  Cybersecurity has become a hot topic in politics over the last decade, but particularly since the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008.  As Lawson pointed out, however, our motivations for pursuing cybersecurity have changed considerably over the last decade.  Initially, the motivation behind developing cybersecurity was to prevent an attack on the country’s infrastructure – the “cyberdoom” scenarios where hackers are able to knock out the nation’s power grid or cause a meltdown at a nuclear plant.  As time went on and no such attacks took place, the emphasis began to shift away from threats to critical infrastructure and toward the more practical problems of IP theft.  In the White House’s 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review, threats to infrastructure are dealt with, but much of the focus is placed on threats to intellectual property.  The report estimates the financial losses in 2008 from intellectual property and data theft to be as high as 1 trillion dollars.³ How they came to that number isn’t exactly clear, since the document that they cite estimates losses from IP theft at only $559 million and is focused on security breaches, not piracy.⁴

While the White House’s estimate may be a bit suspicious, more significant than its accuracy is its meaning.  What does it mean to lose money to IP theft?  If a million people download a movie that retails for $30, is that a $30 million loss in sales?  What about people who download the file multiple times?  What about people who later buy the DVD?  What about people who later watch the same movie on Netflix?  Did the time I watched my friend’s bootlegged copy of Lord of the Rings (complete with Korean subtitles) in high school negate the hundreds of dollars I probably spent on movie tickets, DVDs and other items?  The real problem isn’t that these estimates on “informational damage” are inaccurate, it’s that they’re practically meaningless.

While trying to estimate the informational damage to the entertainment industry is very problematic, it becomes even more so when applying these same estimates to military technology.  While you can argue that a teenager downloading an MP3 without paying for it takes money away from someone, a foreign agent stealing plans for a new fighter jet is a very different problem and requires a very different solution.  In cybersecurity discourse, however, teenagers and spies are often lumped together in the same category.

One of the main points that Lawson brought up was that the discourse of cybersecurity has combined a number of different threats into a single “generic cyberthreat.”  The concept of a generic cyberthreat combines the prevalance of IP theft and the potential impact of cyberdoom scenarios.  Unfortunately, by distorting cybersecurity threats in this way, we ignore more plausible threats.  We also end up with solutions that don’t fit the problem, such as the US Cyber Command, a military command whose role may or may not include policing bootlegged copies of Avatar.  Additionally, in the wake of the SOPA debacle, lawmakers are now terrified of being associated with any kind of legislation that could be seen as trying to regulate the Internet.  This includes cybersecurity initiatives.

So if the realm of cybersecurity is so hyped and convoluted, how should we deal with things like cyberwarfare?  Lawson made two main suggestions.  First, we need to disentangle the many different issues that make up “cyberthreats.”  The military should be left to deal with actual threats to national security, such as attacks on critical infrastructure.  Issues like copyright infringement, which are most certainly not threats to national security, should be dealt with in more appropriate ways.

His second suggestion, which caught my attention, was for the US to focus less of its resources on cybersecurity and more on basic computing research.  To many, this may seem like a counterintuitive move, especially if we continue to conflate things like military research with entertainment products.  For the entertainment industry, the value of movies and songs is in its ability to control them and sell them to consumers.  With military R&D, the value of their work is keeping us two steps ahead of other military organizations.  Losing valuable research is a setback, but as long as we still have a good lead, we’re still in good shape.  Lawson’s concern is that as we focus more and more on cybersecurity, we’re not doing as much research in the basic computing fields that put us in the lead in the first place.  With the job market in cybersecutiry booming,  more people getting degrees in computer science are going to move into security, rather than fields that Lawson calls more “progressive.”  Even with the best security around, it’s hard to win a race when you’re not moving forward.

Not surprisingly, this reminded me of a similar situation within the videogame industry, the debate over DRM.  Since companies like Nintendo and Sega were among the first to attempt to control intellectual property and licensing agreements through technological means, the inclusion of DRM on a game usually goes without saying.  Like many aspects of cybersecurity, however, this is often a losing battle.  What do you do when the best security money can buy doesn’t stop your game from being pirated?

Why not focus your attention elsewhere?

In contrast to the mainstream videogame industry, many independent developers have taken a stand against DRM.  While there are many reasons why indie developers choose not to use DRM (including many ethical and ideological reasons). one of these reasons is simply that time spent adding DRM to the game could be better spent actually working on the game and making it better.  While this inevitably leads to piracy, that doesn’t prevent the game from selling.  In fact, many developers like Introversion (you may have guessed that I’ve been playing a lot of their games recently) and the other Humble Bundle participants have had amazing success without any DRM at all.

This is certainly not a call to abandon cybersecurity completely.  As unlikely as they may be, we should still make sure that we don’t leave ourselves open to potential cyberdoom scenarios.  On the other hand, when it comes to trying to use the military to police threats that are clearly not matters of national security, I really think we have better things we could be doing.

References

1. Testimony of Michael O’Leary on Behalf of the MPAA.
2. Dowling v. United States.
3. The White House, Cyberspace Policy Review.
4. McAfee, Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information.

Filed under: Copyright, Cyberwar, Hacking, Indie Games by Pete
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Last weekend was a busy one for anyone involved in the local Utah videogame scene.  Two of the biggest technology events of the year, the PushButton Summit and the Gaming and Electronics Expo (GEEX) both took place last week.  Unfortunately, they took place at pretty much the same time.  Even though I’ve been looking forward to PushButton for over a year now, I had to skip it for GEEX.  Although there were more presentations that I wanted to see at PushButton, GEEX happens to host one of the most exciting gaming events around – their annual Game-in-a-Day competition.  As a big advocate of indie game development, I could hardly pass up an opportunity to practice what I preach.  As the name implies, participants have just 24 hours, from noon on Friday to noon on Saturday, to complete a game.  Most of the developers work in groups, but I went solo this year.

The Game-in-a-Day Competition had its share of ups and downs for me this year.  On the downside, I managed to crash Flash Builder at 11:30, corrupting the entire directory and erasing all my source files (and guess who forgot to make a backup).  On the upside, however, I was able to salvage a SWF file from 6:00 in the morning to enter in the competition, which managed to win an honorable mention, despite being a fairly rough version of the game.  It was also my first attempt at making a game using Flixel, an open-source library for Flash game development.

All things considered, the game went better than I had expected.  Despite having a few problems getting used to the quirks of some of the Flixel classes (Which I’ll go into detail about on another day), I managed to implement almost all of the features that I wanted to experiment with, including a two-player splitscreen mode.  I also got plenty of encouraging comments from people who played, other developers, and even a few random industry people who were checking out the competition.  If nothing else, it was a nice ego boost, especially after losing all my code.  It also makes me wonder how my game would have done had I been able to use the full 24 hours instead of just being satisfied with the 18 hour version.  In any case, it’s now been added to my long list of unfinished games, but it has the advantage of being much more complete than my average project.  Maybe that means I’ll get around to it sooner.  For now, I’ll simply leave you with the trailer I made for the presentation.  Enjoy.

Filed under: Game Dev, Good Old Utah, Indie Games by Pete
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As I mentioned last week, I ended up with pages worth of notes after this year’s Frontiers of New Media symposium and a number of ideas that have been floating around in my head ever since.  I decided to start by talking about my impressions of the presentation that was closest to my own research, hence, this post will be all about videogames.  More specifically, I will be talking about Clare Woods’ presentation about the portrayal of books and libraries in World of Warcraft.  Her arguments, as I saw them, mostly revolved around two central themes.  The first was that books as in-game artifacts are completely divorced from the methods of their production.  The second theme was that the implementation of books in the game world is shallow.  In both cases, she didn’t argue that the game’s final design was necessarily bad, but that the designers had missed opportunities to make the game more meaningful and engaging (and maybe even *gasp* educational).

World of Warcraft is nothing if not immersive.  Although “realistic” may not be the correct description for a virtual world populated with elves and trolls, the designers at least went out of their way to make it “internally consistant” in that the game conforms rigorously to the conventions of the neomedieval fantasy MMO.  The landscape is marked by tall stone towers, quaint villages and other appropriately archaic architecture.  People may be running around with huge glowing swords, but there are also people mining iron, smelting steel and generally supporting the huge glowing sword industry.  Despite a number of deliberate anachronistic elements, such as the conspicuously capitalist nature of its supposedly feudal society¹, the game stays true to its pseudo-historical setting…except perhaps when it comes to books.

As Woods pointed out in her presentation, there are a number of public libraries in World of Warcraft.  Given the value of books during the middle ages, this ease of access itself is somewhat ahistorical.  Perhaps more problematic, however, is that these libraries have a distinctly modern layout.  They primarily consist of the easily recognizable stacks that one might see in any local library today.  What is absent from these medieval libraries are the desks, the lecterns, the scribes – everything associated with the production of books.  Historically, books were incredibly valuable, both because of the resources involved in their production and because of the small number of people skilled enough to actually write them.  While you can become a scribe in World of Warcraft, this profession is centered around creating exotic inks to craft magic scrolls and charms, not the traditional books you find in the libraries.  Those books are simply there, sitting on shelves, lying on tables.  As Woods noted, we’re never encouraged to give up our modern notion that books are cheap and common.

When the player does interact with those books, at least the few that are not simply part of the background, they generally give a small snippet of game lore.  Many players might find a few paragraphs of fictional history less than compelling, especially when there is so much else to see and do in the game world.  Of course, there are still those out there who really love lore, but for the majority of players, books are little more than decoration.

The recurring question throughout Woods’ presentation was how could the developers have made books more useful to the players?  I think that the best way to address that question is to look at the way that books are implemented in other games.

Not surprisingly, the first game that came to mind as I was listening to her presentation was Minecraft.  Of course, there are no classes or professions in Minecraft, but if one was to analyze my style of play, I think that “scribe” would be an appropriate title for my character.  As soon as I had managed to build a secure shelter, I set out to make myself some books.  Unfortunately, making books in Minecraft is a fairly labor intensive process.  This was especially true for me, as my home island didn’t happen to have the resources to make books.  Thus, the first step in my quest was to construct a boat and set off in search of sugar cane (originally known as reeds).  I found some growing on the shore of a nearby island, which I harvested and took home.  Of course, two pieces of sugar cane isn’t enough to create a book, so I began cultivating it on my island until I had a decent amount stockpiled.  I was then able to take it back to my workbench and craft it into paper, which I would in turn craft into books.  I then took my new books and some wooden planks and set about building bookshelves.  Eventually, I was able to create enough books to build my own library within my tiny hobbit hole.

Although Minecraft portrays the process of book production in a much more detailed way than World of Warcraft, it shares a similar problem in that there isn’t really much you can do with books yet (Notch has suggested that books may eventually be usable, just as maps are).  For now, they are simply ornamentation for the game world, rather than a meaningful part of it.

One of Woods’ suggestions for increasing the depth of in-game books beyond their current state was essentially to crowdsource it.  Rather than the developers slicing the fictional history of Azeroth into enough tiny slices that one can be placed in each book in the library, why not take advantage of the in-game history being made by the players themselves?  After all, the whole premise of the game is that players get to run around doing heroic things all day.  If even a fraction of this activity were recorded, it could easily fill every empty tome in the game.

So what would such a system look like?  There is already a great deal of content being created by World of Warcraft fans in the form of both fan fiction and art.  Could it be a simple matter of making a way to display such content in-game?  It’s hard to say if such an approach would be compelling.  Even though millions of people are embarking on quests every day, they pretty much embark on the same quests over and over.  Most players would probably rather go battle dragons themselves than read about another player doing the same thing.  While there are certainly unexpected happenings that occur while on these quests, including the occasional Leeroy Jenkins moment, the structure of World of Warcraft is somewhat limiting to its literary potential.

This doesn’t mean that such an approach is impossible within the framework of a videogame, it just requires a different approach.  A good counter-example is Dwarf Fortress.  With it’s ASCII graphics and Everest-like learning curve, it may not seem like a likely candidate for creating more engaging stories.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Dwarf Fortress is essentially a complex simulation for generating unique narratives.  Not only does the game task itself with generating a complete world map when you start a new world, it creates a complete history of wars, nations and heroes.  Every dwarf who comes to your fortress has his or her own story, and it’s different every time.  Whereas no one wants to hear the story of the awesome loot that dropped when you killed Rend Blackhand, tales of fallen fortresses are spread far and wide across the Internet, even if only among Dwarf Fortress‘ cult following.  You would be hard-pressed to find a dedicated Dwarf Fortress player who hasn’t heard of the sagas of Oilfurnace, Boatmurdered, Bravemule or Bronzemurder.  Even a novice like me (who has yet to have a fortress survive the first winter) can get almost as much enjoyment out of hearing the experiences of others as playing for himself.

I don’t know if any of these ideas could necessarily be implemented in a game like World of Warcraft, but they are intriguing ideas.  At the least, Woods’ presentation suggests new lines of thought, both in terms of analyzing historical content in games and in imagining new possibilities for game design.  I would be really interested to see some of these ideas implemented in a prototype.  Something to put on the back burner, I suppose…

World of Warcraft images from WoWWiki.

References

1. Games of Empire. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter.

Filed under: Frontiers of New Media, Game Design, Media History by Pete
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