alt.vg

I've spent almost the entire day absorbing all available information on Warhammer Online. Until this month, I had complete apathy towards the game. Wrong setting (40K should have been the obvious choice), wrong timing (WoW still riding high, Age of Conan on the way), wrong mechanic (you can't be a WoW killer if you're a WoW clone).

The suspiciously gushing coverage in Edge this month changed that. I remain skeptical as to the writer of the piece, as it read much like it was authored work experience kid who had a really fun time at the PR event. I should know, I was that kid at one point. But this is beside the point.

The hype machine is a well-trodden subject, but I wanted to say that yes, I completely agree with Dennis Dyack's viewpoint: don't show the game until it's done. The careful management of fanboy fervour is time-consuming for developers and fans alike, and in the case of Age of Conan, has probably burnt out for many even before the game is released.

Many people - and when I am not deluding myself, I am in this demographic - really enjoy the lead up to a game. Watching all the information, analysing it, discussing it with similarly excited friends, can be fun. For the most part, in reality, it is not. It's a lesson of building up hopes to unrealistic expectations, then feeling disappointed. Perhaps only GTA IV has managed to live up to the hype; but there was no secret to Rockstar's plan. The amount of information flowing about GTA IV, much like previous versions, was far less than some other triple-A games. Gamers were surprised and delighted about new elements in the game; freed from the nagging disappointments in their back of their minds about features they thought would be realised differently.

Will I enjoy Warhammer Online? Only if I manage to forget about it.

In an industry pushing towards wider participation, why are gamers treated as adversaries?

Why do we still have region-locking (thanks Microsoft)? Incomprehensible friend codes (I'm looking at you, Nintendo)? Anti-piracy measures that require game activation (you must be proud, EA)?

The "hardcore" gamer has trouble putting up with such things, how casual gamers are supposed to fare is a mystery.

The hoops needed to be leapt are too many and too complicated. Publishers need to take notice of online businesses that are absolutely destroying them at usability: Facebook is a great example. Facebook went from zero to millions of users in a year. You don't get there by making it difficult for your customers. You get there by treating them well.

The games industry should also be looking over its history books. The recording and movie industry has failed miserably it their campaigns against consumers. People who rent movies fair and square have to put up with minute long trailers about the horrors of piracy. The pirates remove those from their copies, creating a more enjoyable experience. No doubt pirates of games using SecuROM et al are also getting a better deal than those who paid up.

The industry is turning away the exact people it's trying to attract.

Nintendogs has been taking up much of the significant other's spare time. Interestingly, her pug "Rollie" is every bit the dog that she expects her to be.

Nintendo has long understood something that, in general, has been largely unspoken.

We want to believe.

It's not necessary to get every behaviour right. Just as we anthropomorphise real animals, so too do the players of Nintendogs. Despite the poor audiovisual output of the DS, the agency of the world is what contributes to the "believability" of the character. Just as we are willing to follow and become emotionally invested in the animated stories of Disney et al, so are we video games. By choosing to model an animal that doesn't have to respond in the way we always expect, Nintendo chose a domain where the agency of the world could never be broken.

The authors of "Evaluating a Conversation-Based Drama" have found that players' of Facade were similarly willing to believe.

[players were] adept at creating elaborate back-stories to make sense of character reactions. Façade successfully provides the player with ample material (hints at conflicts and topics relevant to the story) for creating these back-stories.

 

Facade works because it constrains the domain of possible reactions and threads of conversation to the marital problems of the NPCs. Fortunately, many games are similarly constrained. One can easily imagine aggression in action games being used to tighten the domain. Flight-simulators and military simulations can place limits on the radio chatter from the player. The question is not whether it is possible to implement such interactions, but whether these interactions fit with the game design, and the interface used to enable them.

I spoke with applied linguists a couple of weeks ago. Many were unable to separate the idea of passing the Turing Test from actually being sentient. They were not able to understand that the Turing Test is in itself a constrained domain, which makes it very much within our grasp. We tend to think of the AI of human NPCs in games in the same way. Acting human has many facets in many situations, but game narratives are focused on a certain environment or tone.

There are many faces to being human, but many games need only model one. And we're almost there.

Is anyone else surprised that the majority of games manage to ship on their release dates, without slipping?

Entertainment forms with heavy reliance on cutting-edge computer technology, such as video games or blockbuster movies, are essentially trips into the unknown. The latest technology has no warranty or guarantee, you hope that what you think will work does work, and to your satisfaction. Game studios have large research components, but unlike academics squirrelled away in university campuses, if the research fails, the whole company could go under.

That studios like Epic, iD and Valve are willing and able to stake their companies on their research is a tremendous leap of faith. We shouldn't deplore any game (Duke Nukem Forever notwithstanding) for missing a release date conjured in a crystal ball. We should congratulate, or at least understand, the attention to quality and the risks taken to even reach a point where a delay was announced.

As I look down the barrel of a five-year Ph.D. aimed squarely between the eyes, I can only begin to understand the trepidation a studio can have when undertaking a research project with only the faintest glimmer of hope. 

Euphoria, the procedural animation system that's getting its big-time debut in GTA IV, is invisible.

Unlike the leap forward physics took when Havok landed in GTA IV, no-one coming to GTA IV is astounded by Euphoria.

And that's the point.

You don't notice when you drive up to pedestrians and they shimmy around the car. You don't notice that people pushed off of buildings fall headfirst, tumbling through the air. You don't notice that people stumble when you jab them in the kidney.

You don't notice because your brain doesn't register things that should be happening.

The best middleware is invisible.

My time has been recently dominated by Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I'm by no means an Advance Wars expert, nor one who has been with the series since it's inception, having started at Advance Wars 2.

I actually had few hopes for this game, after Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Dual Strike suffered from an over-extension of the game mechanics, needlessly introducing 27 different "Commanding Officers" (each with different battlefield statistics boosts). Even worse, a tag team mechanic teamed COs together, varying the buffs, a special attack called a "Tag Power", an affinity ranking for how well two COs work together and even experience points that level up the COs! Despite a strong critical reception, the game had become needlessly obtuse, losing sight of the original battlefield strategy for a meta-game of CO juggling.

The storyline fared little better, achieving a feat of becoming convoluted in very few lines of actual text, as well as revelling in self-referential dialogue that newcomers couldn't hope to understand.

It was a mess.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is a much improved game. Intelligent Systems took the brave step of removing the old story-line in its entirety, for a new cast and setting. All the needless additions to the Advance Wars formula that plagued Dual Strike were stripped away, exposing the base mechanic; allowing it to shine. However, there are people for whom this is a problem. Dan Shu's review at 1UP:

..."the game also loses a lot of other features from Advance Wars: Dual Strike. And we mean a lot. Casualties of war include dual-screen/two-map matches, CO experience points and leveling up, Hachi's store (which let you buy new options and maps), Survival mode, and Combat mode. Fans can argue that most of that stuff's just fluff, but the missing elements do make this sequel feel less beefy" (my emphasis)

It's hard to tell whether Shu was grasping at straws to make a point or really believed that the loss of levelling up was a problem. Can the loss of superfluous game modes really be lamented, when the game is offering better core gameplay?

The gaming media, and gaming public, clamour for originality and stronger base game mechanics, but then seem to apply this rule unevenly. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is too light on features, or GTA IV is smaller than GTA3: San Andreas. There are some who would argue GTA3 was better than GTA3: San Andreas, as the Liberty City design was much tighter and more rewarding to those who learnt the shortcuts and backsteets. It seems that the media have an idea of what the game should have when they arrive at the game based on their experience and affinity with previous games in the series.

Instead of congratulating developers for having the courage to trim the fat off their games, exposing the core gameplay that the we ask for, we choose to condemn sequels based on bullet-point lists of quantifiable features against previous editions. Perhaps a BMI measurement would be a better indicator.

We talk about the geographics of video games in such broad strokes: "Western (North America/Europe)/Japanese/Korean". Often this terminology is used to describe game styles and expectations, tied to cultural norms. The localisation of games revolves around this.

The problem for the "Western" area is that culture, as a whole, extends far beyond simple politeness principles. Literature, music, fables and such are all different in different countries. Game development used to embrace the cultures of their birth: the UK development scene in the 80s gave rise to Python-esque games littered with British humour that simply didn't translate elsewhere. The GTA series are perhaps the last games to make any "British-style" jokes.

As an example of the disjoint, the above video for the canned Acclaim version of Juiced appeared on Digg some time ago, under the title "One of the worst video game intros. Ever. 3:36 of pain." As per usual on Digg, the comments were vitriolic and merciless, mainly from North Americans. However, Acclaim's marketing team probably thought they were doing the right thing! The video tapped into UK grime, a popular underground movement at the time. While the actual composition of the video is poor, the music itself would have been well received. In the UK.

All games are now positioned to take on a global market, which, thus far, has lead to a drastic homogenisation of what it means to be a "Western" game, mainly towards what appeals in the United States. The UK largely escapes this unscathed, with a culture that is rapidly becoming much like the US. However, countries like France and Spain must fare worse.

Is it too much to hope that companies may begin to culturally localise games within the Western territory? Must we, yet again, place our faith in indie development on XBLA and PSN to bring "niche" games that carry greater appeal to certain countries?

Having given a lot of thought into my interests, I am almost certain (can you be almost certain?) that I want to study drama management, particularly carrying on the work from Mark Nelson et al on Anchorhead (see "Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management in Interactive Fiction"). The image is from Facade, probably the most famous and successful interactive drama.

It needs to be tried in a full environment. I'd love to work in Crackdown, but that never hit the PC. Grand Theft Auto has been modded, but it's all nasty hacks. It seems the best candidate would be Neverwinter Nights 2. It can store state well enough, but the script itself is not extensible, although the development environment is. There's no way I could, for example, query WordNet. I could create a huge conversation tree with a plugin that gets compiled down, but that's not really good enough for trying anything with NLP. More research needed on this.

---
Research Notes is a semi-regular column about being a Computer Science PhD student at UC Santa Cruz.

The Times put together a graph "to help all those people who think gamers can't understand the differences between video games and real life."

"Three red lights flash on the Ring of Light" is the official description Microsoft gave my support ticket when the Xbox 360 went the way of the RRoD.

Microsoft have done very well in their handling of the issue, sending out replacement Xbox's speedily. Here in New Zealand, a shipping label is emailed to customers to place on a box to ship the 360 out for free. Microsoft Support should be commended for their professionalism.

We all know that Microsoft have spent a lot of money trying to rectify the problem, but how much of a problem is it? The Times has an in-depth article on the issue.

Diarmid Andrews, a director at GT Electronics, a Dundee-based repairer which is still offering to fix the machines despite having only a 70 per cent success rate, said: "It's a big, big issue. My estimate is that about a quarter to a third of units are experiencing this problem."

Mr Andrews said his company was now getting more than 100 Xboxes with 'Red Ring' a week, and had taken on 3 extra staff to cope with demand.

Microsoft are quoted as saying that "there is no single root cause or systemic issue with any of the Xbox 360 consoles." Many gamers around the world would probably scoff at such a claim, and with repair centres estimating over 20% of consoles suffering from a Red Ring, it is becoming increasingly easy to find people who's Xbox have failed. The team at 1UP Yours have begun referring to the issue as an inevitability rather than a case of bad luck.

How can Microsoft have engineered a system with such workmanship? Consumer electronics, from iPods to Playstations to washing machines have never suffered such catastrophic failure rates without a full product recall. Microsoft has not done this, and one is left speculating as to why. Is there really no systematic issue (doubtful)? In face, the answer is probably right under our noses: the mainstream media has not taken up the cause. Without anyone holding Microsoft's feet to the fire, the problem doesn't exist in the greater public's consciousness. Consumers around the world are paying out for expensive pieces of hardware, with no knowledge about the crap shoot that Xbox ownership has become. Microsoft would be fools to change that perception, and so there never will be a mass recall of 360 units. The marketing department of Microsoft has trouble enough as it is, sullying the 360 brand would be commercial suicide.

My Xbox arrived yesterday. One can only hope it doesn't take another trip.