Teleport-Tac-Toe

I hatched another business card board game idea today. It's Tic-Tac-Toe with an inter-dimensional twist. The mock-up above shows what would be the back of the business card. One player plays dimes, the other pennies. Each turn the player can either play a new piece or move an existing one. Pieces can only be played on white squares. The goal is to get three in a row, but one of those three has to be on the center square.

The teleportation element is that the board acts like a Pac-Man screen, wrapping around. A piece can thus be moved from the top left to the top right, or from the top left to the bottom left, and so on. I'm imagining two possibilities for gameplay: first, that teleporting into a blank space could capture enemy pieces if they are surrounded on at least two sides. This would remove the piece from play (though the player could play it back in a new empty space). The other option is that you could teleport into occupied spaces, but only if you could slide the occupying piece into a blank space in the same direction of travel. That sounds confusing, but I'll illustrate it once I've played it out a few times. Also, until testing, I have no idea if this is going to be fun or not. It may be too solvable, just like regular tic-tac-toe. We'll see.

Last but not least, if this game makes the cut, I'll definitely want to re-brand it in a way that removes the tic-tac-toe references. When I think of that game I think solvable, impossible to win, uninteresting. It'll be "Space Cargo Embargo" or something.

Down in the Valley

I didn't play Burnout Paradise when it first came out for the 360 in 2008. Those were my early days of “next gen” gaming, when I was still indignant about having to pay $60 for a video game. But with with 2009 coming to a close I put it on my Christmas list and the 'rents picked it up for a steal. It is, as all the reviews said, very cool. I am not a fan of racing games in general, but I am a fan of sparks and metal rent asunder, and Burnout Paradise delivers. For those not in the know, the racing series has been around for a while, but what has always set it apart is the focus on crashing. When you crash, the game slows down, the camera zooms in, sparks fly. And you drive on real roads, with traffic. Previous games even included modes where you earned points for each successive car that crashed when you started an accident, allowing you to cause massive chaos. It's awesome.

So Burnout Paradise brings open-world driving to the formula, and the result is Paradise City: miles of road spanning city and countryside, and dozens and dozens of events. The seamless environment is great, because you can run a race from the beach to the county, and then just pick up a new event out there and do something else. Instead of levels or courses, everything is connected. But there's something that bothers me about the game. There are no people. Miles of beach front sidewalks go untouched, crosswalks are left barren. Most bizarre of all, not a single one of the thousands of cars that populate the city has a driver.

The lack of people in a game about glorifying horrible crashes is not so hard to understand. There are the technical considerations of modeling people and animating them, mostly so they can try to jump out of the way, and figuring out what happens to them when the car they were cruising in is compressed into a small pile of scrap. There is the rating consideration too, as adding people inadvertently adds a great deal of violence to a game that has none. Most of all the decision was probably about focus and design. Adding people means crashes have a kill count and pedestrians live in fear of every 12-year-old player with a desire to chase them, and that's just not what the Burnout series is about. So people were a problem, and they left them out.

The lack of people creates another problem, however. For myself at least, driving my driver-less car through the active-yet-uninhabited city is off-putting at best, mildly terrifying at worst. The game's visuals stress realism in all aspects of the driving and the environment, but the game comes off like a strange dream. I am reminded of that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy wakes up without any context and walks into an abandoned town, where breakfast is cooking on the stove but there's no one to eat it. In Paradise City I can almost see the kids skating around the corner far ahead of me, but no, they aren't really there.

A roboticist in 1970 coined the term “Uncanny Valley” when describing the nature of human and robot interactions. It goes like this: If you were to measure a person's emotional reaction to a robot (or a CGI character, or puppet, etc.), you would see that reaction become more and more favorable as the robot looked more and more human. But there comes a point at which the robot looks almost human, but not quite, and the emotional reaction becomes strongly negative. That's the valley. If the robot continues to look more and more human, you can eventually pull out of it, at which point you should use the robot to replace you and do the menial chores of everyday life while you live la vida loca.

There are a number of explanations as to why the valley exists. My favorite is that by looking so human, the “being” creates a connection between its human elements and the inhuman ones, and basically it's terrifying. A classic example is the movie The Polar Express. Back in school my professor told me he had heard it described “as either a horrible children's movie, or a pretty good horror movie.” One of the sited reasons that The Polar Express was so revolting is that the characters don't have tongues inside their mouths. When they open, they reveal a bottomless maw of black soul-sucking darkness. Yeah, its scary.

To bring the discussion back to video games, my point is this: the theory of the “Uncanny Valley” highlights the problem with disconnects between what we perceive and what we expect. The fundamental idea behind the valley applies broadly, especially in video games, which are all about created worlds, characters, and spaces. I hit on this point in my critique of Assassin's Creed II, which you should read here. The short version is that ACII suffers from a disconnect between the narrative, in which you play a hero seeking revenge, and the gameplay, in which you play a murderous psychopath whose crimes go unpunished. If, as in Assassin's Creed II, the game casts the player as a hero narratively, but then encourages un-hero-like play, you're in the valley. If you create a visually rich world filled with sun-drenched ocean drives, promenades, highways, and country roads, and then leave it with no people, it becomes oddly terrifying.

I mentioned earlier that the case of Burnout Paradise was likely a design choice, but many of the gaps that appear in the presentation of modern games stem directly from the unfortunate use of graphics as the yardstick for achievement. The industry business model seems to be to use graphics to sell the game, and make the gameplay just good enough not to piss everyone off for buying it. But the more convincing the the game environment, the less I'm willing to forgive the rough edges. Burnout looks beautiful, even real, but that means the lack of population sticks out even more.

Another example is Dragon Age: Origins. The game builds off of the Bioware predecessors, and is the best looking yet (minus Mass Effect II maybe, which I haven't played yet), but that becomes one of it's biggest flaws. The game looks beautiful, but plays almost identically to KOTOR, a game I played six years ago. I really hit a wall when I realized that the environments, which look very organic and interesting, play as if you're on a flat 2D map. And there are countless other recent examples of these valley-like disconnects in modern games. Moreover, there will be countless more. Not all areas of game creation advance at the same pace, due to budget, time, priorities, laziness, and on and on. Where two of these areas don't match up, there lies a possible “Uncanny Valley” for players.

Games have just barely been around long enough to begin the “art” discussion, and one of the common, and worst, arguments in favor of calling games art is just how pretty they've gotten. I've got plenty to say about that one, but that's for another time. For today, I'll say this: games have nearly run out of mileage in pushing toward hyper-realistic graphics, physics, etc. The farther you push one element, the more disconnected it becomes from the rest of the experience. To truly go the distance in delivering an immersive experience, the game elements need to match. A less technically impressive, but well matched experience will win over a fancy mismatched one any day, at least on my screen.

More on that to come.

Game Design Challenge

I've been out of town, hence the blog neglect, and I'm working on a long piece that's taken more work than I thought. In the meantime I thought I would go ahead and propose a game design challenge, both for myself and for anyone who wants to join in. The challenge is this: design a game that fits on a business card. Why? Plenty of reasons. The size will require minimalism, and the games will be easily portable. They will be cheap to make with professional or at home printing, and thus easy to share. And restrictions are fun!

This all began when I was designing my first business card about six months ago. I thought it would be nifty for a game designer's business card to have a tiny game on the back. At the time, the card was for a conference for my job at Cartoon Network, so I ended up creating some pixel CN characters and identifying myself as a production coordinator (which, at the time, was more accurate anyway), but the idea stuck. Plus there's real appeal for me in non-digital games. They can be prototyped faster and played more easily, and are a good way to "practice" without the investment video games require.

The rules for this challenge are very flexible. I'm imagining a board game, where the card serves as a tiny board, but you don't have to look at it that way. The card could simply hold tables, numbers, dots, whatever. Perhaps placing multiple cards next to each other creates a flexibly sized game board? The game can use both sides of the card, and does not have to be a business card, it just has to fit on one. The design needs to be tailored to the small scale of the card, not simply shrunk to fit. Both single-player and multiplayer games are great. Perhaps the perfect game would include instructions on the card space as well (allowing you to leave them around to be discovered by strangers), but for multiplayer games the owner could always just explain the rules.

For pieces, the games should not require anything that can't be accommodated with spare change or something similar. Pennies could be counters, a dime heads up could be player one, tails player two, etc. I'm willing to allow the rules to call for a die, but nothing beyond a regular d6. Better yet would be for all game related decisions to be determinable with a coin flip.

Above is a quick mock-up of my first idea, hatched this afternoon: LifeRPG. In the game the player starts at the blue shield in the upper left. To move, the player has to complete a task in real life. It could be going to the gym, dodging an impulse buy, or speaking up in class. It could be cutting down your debt by a certain amount or skipping desert. It's the player's choice, but the object is to make a game out of real life. Players get one square per accomplishment, marked by X-ing out the square.

To win, players simply escape the maze, but if they choose to head for the red circles they get a chance to win treasure (determined by a coin toss or die roll). Treasure won is marked in the empty boxes, and can be redeemed by the player for a treat. If the player is cutting down on their debt, the treasure could equal a meal out, guilt free. If they're trying to exercise more it could be a free day off from the gym. The point is the treasure should be a sweet reward, but not something that will derail the purpose of playing the game.

The larger box would determine how treasure was won, but I haven't entirely worked that out yet. Maybe there are numbers 1-6, with two numbers winning treasure, two giving you a free move, and two giving nothing. Maybe treasure is won by a coin toss, and this area could be used for flavor text: "You've found some pirate's gold!" The final box is for marking your level. You level up every time to complete a card, plus one for every treasure you choose not to redeem.

Last but not least, this mock-up is only one of many in the complete set. There could be multiple floorplans for each type, and types could include dungeons, snow caves, lava fields, etc. Players would be encouraged to keep the game going, and maybe they could even relate the stories of their adventurers online and share their accomplishments. How many levels can you achieve?

So that's it, a challenge and a first idea. I'm hoping to generate a whole bunch more. Don't get too caught up in mine though; there are many ways to approach business card board gaming. No reason why there couldn't be a business card eight-player war game. Surprise me. If you hatch an idea, email me a concept or mock-up. Better yet, make the thing and send a picture. I'll post everything I get. There's no time limit, as I'm treating this as an ongoing personal project. Let's see what happens!

Robot Unicorn Attack

 

Robot Unicorn Attack is the newest game up on adultswim.com. It's like Canabalt for the trapper keeper generation. The player sends their unicorn bounding across purple floating platforms, grabbing fairies and smashing stars for points. With each star you smash or fairy you grab without missing any, the point value of each increases. 

The game also adds double-jumping and dashing to the Canabalt control scheme, and therefore a second button, so while it lacks the perfect zen of a great game of Canabalt, RUA has a degree of frenzy all it's own. The game moves faster and faster the higher your score climbs, until your inevitable demise. It reminds me of Tetris or Lumines late in a game, where you know the end is coming, and no matter how well you play you're never quite in control.

Last but not least Robot Unicorn Attack has a truly perfect soundtrack, a syrupy 80's fantasy that matches this game as well as (and more hilarious than) the woeful techno beats pursuing Canabalt players. I'm sure not-so-friendly comparisons will be drawn between the two, but the emphasis here on point multipliers really makes it a different kind of game. Try it for yourself.

New Header

For the two people I know of who check out this page with any regularity (Mom, Dad, I'm talking 'bout you), you may have noticed I changed the header. Woohoo pixels. My original intention was to change the header every week, but I realize I won't have time for that. Instead I'm aiming at once a month, with something special for holidays if I remember. My ladylove won't let me forget Valentines, so I'll probably have a special one then.

So why pixel art? It's a 'less is more' thing, and it's turning into a bit of a theory about game art and game design, but the half-chewed thought bits haven't really digested yet. From where I'm sitting there's more power, maybe even more possibility for connection, with characters and environments given the most minimalist presentation that still makes it clear what's what.

More on that in the next full length post. For now, enjoy the climbers.