Ask the Blogosphere…Game Design Elements

There’s an answer to everything on teh intraweb.  You just have to ask.  As a gamer, and someone who appreciates great design, I’ve always wondered what games actually pioneered some of the basic features or design elements we now all take for granted.  With most new games, we only notice when some of these things are absent.  Sometimes when we see them in a new game, we say “oh they just ripped this off from game X.”  This is where innovation meets convergent evolution.

If I get sufficient responses, I’ll summarize and repost.  We all have a general idea where some of these originated, but game lore masters, help us out.  Part trivia, part design retrospective.  Call it an exercise in back filling game design lore.

Name the game and/or approximate date that the following was implemented in a game.  I’ll throw out eleven to start, but feel free to suggest other elements and their origin as well.  Note, many of these things may have been developed outside of MMOs (maybe even non graphical games), but we find them now in many games across many genres.

1.  The target circle (that ground level highlight that shows who you’ve targeted).
2.  The radar/mini map
3.  The In-Game World Map
4.  Taxi Travel (birds, boats, trains, teleports and other non-player controlled transport)
5.  The Bank (Player specific storage)
6.  The Quest Log
7.  Recall Travel (the ability to return to a fixed point instantaneously)
8.  Player Housing
9.  WASD movement controls (out of the box).
10. Player to Player Trade
11. Mail

Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

Old Bones

Moving is not a particularly fun task.  There’s a certain element of defeatism when confronting those boxes that you moved last time that you still haven’t gotten through and yet here you go again moving them one more time.

You know the boxes, those catch all junk boxes that you’re going to sort out on the other end when you’re not so concerned about time.  And you never do.  Each one is a subtle reminder of the quest incomplete.

Of course, from time to time, in this endeavor one uncovers a long lost treasure:

Yep, my certified card-carrying geek polyhedral dice from my table top days.  Most of those actually came from the Dungeons and Dragons basic boxed set that came out in 1979.  I picked up a few others, including the super cool ten-sided and the faux-suede pouch at a gaming convention at the old Dunfey Hotel in San Mateo, CA.

The Dunfey was something of a fixture which could be observed whizzing by on U.S. 101 in what is now the throbbing heart of Silicon Valley.  At the time, I’m guessing it must have been a Pacificon in 1981 or so, it was distinctively styled as a medieval castle (I think its a Marriott now and has been long since renovated in a more Mediterranean style).

Think the first boxed D&D set, the first Apple II computers and the serious slide rule and pocket protector crowd milling about in the crappy convention rooms of a B-rate hotel in the shape of a castle.  Heck, they had entire rooms devoted to Diplomacy.  It really didn’t get much better than that.

These dice have an interesting way of rearing their heads from time to time.  In 1979, me and my geek friends were nearly hopeless dorks in middle school.  By 1981 and the time of the convention, it was beginning to be the time to put away dorkish and childish things to be high school-cool, not that we succeded.  Like the lost One Ring, they lay submerged but not forgotten until they emerged again in a renaissance of geekdom and beer addled table top gaming in college.

They passed in and out of use from time to time as the old table top group met less and less frequently as life, computers and teh intraweb slowly consumed more of us.  I don’t think I’ve rolled for a wandering monster or made a saving throw in anger in more than 12 years.

I like the idea that as my wife and I prepare for a big move to be closer to friends, family and to restore ourselves to a lifestyle with more balance, these old bones, relics of adventures past, should reemerge to remind me how much a part of me those days and those experiences still are.  As I’ve reconnected with many old friends and gotten thoroughly reimmersed in the gaming community in the last year or so, it seems particularly apt.

Maybe its time to get out the old graph paper again.

Everything old is new again

Ok, so now I’m starting to actually sound my age. I was reading a blurb about Saga the MMORTS that is currently in open beta and that got me thinking. In a nutshell Saga is an real time strategy game (similar in many ways to now “traditional” RTS games like Age of Empires/Kings, Warcraft II, Command and Conquer, StarCraft, etc.) except that its been translated to a persistent multiplayer environment.

According to their FAQ:

Saga is persistent and played online in a massively multiplayer environment. Every building you build, troop you buy, and piece of land you conquer remains with you as long as you play the game. That means every time you fight your friend, you wont have to rebuild your castle from scratch. It also means every time your buildings get damaged or your troops killed, they stay that way unless you repair or ressurrect them. Troops gain experience over time, meaning that they move with you from battle to battle, improving their skills and finding exciting new armor and weapons to equip themselves with.

If that weren’t interesting enough, Saga’s has adopted the free-to-play, pay for booster packs model that an number of games are implementing in one form or another (e.g., Legends of Norrath and basically any other TCG or even MMO with micropayments). In Saga’s case, new and additional troops can be purchased in booster packs.

I used to be an RTS fiend back in the day, so I’m intrigued to see how this plays. Particularly since the “build” is essentially taken out of the game. But as a concept, its an interesting “new” idea that many games are trying to implement in lieu of (or in some cases, in addition to) subscription fees. Seems many game companies are starting to think more like the toy companies of old and less like software companies. Imagine if Blizzard had implemented something like this in StarCraft… we might never have seen WoW and they’d still be gazillionaires.

I say “new” because when I was reading about Saga it hit me where I had seen the idea before: toy soldiers. Yup, growing up we spent countless hours in “PvP” battle with our Airfix 1/72 scale plastic toy soldiers.

Every time we went near the hobby shop behind the old Sears in the San Antonio Shopping Center in Mountain View, California (still a place of myth from my youth where the pantheon of the gods of geekdom resided among the model trains and Estes Rockets which used the forbidden “D” engine…). Each trip I clamored for some addition to my modest collection, fiendishly hording my allowance like a miser saving for that great good thing. A new box of 8th Army men one time, a lorry the next, Paratroopers, the Marines and the mother of them all: the Mobile Rocket Launcher.

I still have quite a few in a coffee can somewhere just waiting for when the balloon goes up. Believe me, they’ll be ready when the cabbage crates come over the briney. They certainly have enough experience after the carnage of the Great Garden Assault and the dreaded Shag Carpet Campaign (from whence the fallen left this earth for Halls of Vacuumalla never to return). Talk about replayability.

Pay for them once and then they are free to play. Want to expand your set? Buy a booster pack of Commandos. Oh, and we could collect them and trade them too and did. Ah, nostalgia.  Now where is that old coffee can?

Hardware Worthy

Wilhelm2451 seems to have touched a nerve with his The Missing Ingredient and follow up post Follow up Thought. I thought I’d add my own 2cp here rather than type them into a small comment box.

One aspect mentioned got me waxing nostalgic:  the relationship of (hardware) accessibility to a game’s success.  In thinking about the games that I’ve played the hell out of, and the myriad system upgrades I’ve embarked upon, I never really upgraded for upgrade’s sake.  Each upgrade was generally driven by a strong desire to improve an already compelling game experience or a bona fide promise of one.  In short, I would pull the trigger on an upgrade if a game was Hardware Worthy.  They must be on to something if a $20 game (oh, the memories) can make you want to throw down hundreds or thousands of dollars for new hardware.

This got me thinking about just what an impact Blizzard has had (on my wallet) in the 13 years since the release of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in 1994.  In retrospect, a big portion of that impact was on hardware manufacturers and resellers.

Yes, 1994.  The year before the first “useable” version of Windows, Windows 95, became available.  If you had Windows in 1994, it was likely the venerable Windows 3.1 and you spent most of your time playing Solitaire or getting all Ren-faire by typing documents in Chancery cursive font.

Unless you were an academic, you probably didn’t use but might have heard of LANs, the internet and email.  When Warcraft was first released, the Mosaic browser was less than a year old.  My how things have changed.

At the time, we simply played the hell out of that game.  What a hardware bonanza it and other games that had promised compelling game play drove (and continues to drive today).  A brief summary of the hardware tax Blizzard and others (e.g., Ensemble’s Age of Empires/Kings, id Software’s Quake and GT Interactive’s Unreal Tournament)  have imposed on me personally over the years:

• A second phone line to facillitate multiplayer play;
• Modem (yes, a modem) upgrades;
• Purchase of a new PII machine with Windows 95;
• Creation of our first trans-household coaxial ethernet network;
• Myriad graphics card upgrades too numerous to mention;
• Numerous processor upgrades (PIII to Athlon XP through X2 64);
• Numerous monitor upgrades (13″, 15″ CRTs to 17″, 19″ LCDs);
• Dial up internet access;
• Broadband internet;
• Voice-over IP hardware (Headsets, mics);
• Comfy chairs;
• Comfy keyboards;
• Comfy mice;
• OS upgrades (DOS to Win 95/Me to XP, but not Vista yet)
• And do it all times 2 for my wife who is also a gamer.

I suspect my list doesn’t look so dissimilar from most of yours as well (adjusted for age).  Yes, that’s a lot of hardware (sorry, HotPockets don’t count as hardware once they leave the freezer) but it even in retrospect it was money well spent.  Each upgrade made a game experience that was already good, better.  Seldom would “pretty good” with the hope of “good” justify such a leap of faith and commitment of hard earned scratch.

When WoW came out in December 2004, I think I was running an Athlon XP 1700 box that I had built with 512MB of RAM and a 64MB MX440 graphics card.  WoW ran pretty darn good on it and that was probably a forward leaning system at the time.  System requirements for WoW are now:

• 800 MHz or higher CPU.
• 256 MB or more of RAM.
• 32 MB 3D graphics card with hardware Transform and Lighting, such as GeForce 2 or better.
• 4 GB or more of available hard drive space.
• DirectX® 9.0c or above.
• A 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection.

We had another machine in the house which was much closer to this which really didn’t cut it.  It was a consumer box that had a 1GHz processor and 256MB of RAM, but an on board video chip which shared memory with the system.  Thus the first WoW-induced system upgrade was born.  It was ok, but just not enough.  But the game was very good despite the obvious hardware limitations.  Quite simply it was Hardware Worthy.

Maybe the most important point is that WoW was not truly accessible in December 2004, but it was nearly accessible to most computers out there.  We didn’t need a better machine for Outlook or Excel or Word or our browser of choice, but we did to realize the obvious potential of the game.  A potential that though not realized under more pedestrian systems, was still clearly visible and within reach.

Games that truly crush system requirements when released can’t make this sale (at least for me).  Near accessibility can.  That’s what WoW did and what EQ2 and Vanguard did not at release.  When FarCry came out to rave reviews earlier in the year, I downloaded the demo and gave it a go.  It was ok, but not great on my system.  To make the leap to great would have been going from a 64MB Geforce 4 video card to a 256MB card.  That’s 2 steps up the ladder and out of the “prosumer” $150-250 bracket and into the “enthusiast” $400+  bracket.  That was a leap I was not willing to take for a game with unproven potential.

The calculus on the WoW front was different.  I could see what a great game it was (even on the crappy machine) and I could convince myself to make a modest upgrade in RAM and/or video card to get to the Great Plateau of Transparent Accessibility wherein you cease consciousness of your hardware and simply play the game.  The well-earned trust of Blizzard’s promise of great gameplay was enough to go on for that short step.

I’m sure that myself and thousands of others made that same leap of faith from near accessibility to true accessibility.  More fundamentally, by building a game that was only one short step ahead, it meant that if and when the fat part of the bell curve discovered the game (say, 6 months to a year after release), mainstream hardware would be at or near the true level of accessibility.

Hard to beat that strategy to ensure the opportunity build a player base.  But opportunity if unanswered doesn’t equal success.  That’s where, IMHO, Wil’s original post fits in.  Blizzard’s hardware strategy helped give them the opportunity to win the player base, but they still had to do it the hard way– by delivering a highly polished compelling game.  People may have bought the box because it was Blizzard, but they pay the subscription because of the game.

The User Built MMO

It was the late 70’s and early 80’s, and yes, we weren’t cool. Not by a long shot. We also weren’t old enough to drive yet, so we did what every other dork was doing, playing table top RPG games, console video games and ultimately generation 0 personal computer games.

Since I reconnected online with an old friend from those days, I’ve lamented the loss of the creative process that was so integral to the table top RPG experience. As anyone who has GM’d knows, running the game was both a great chore and a wonderfully satisfying experience. Yes, it was pretty RP heavy, but with limited tools to create the impression of your world, you had to color with the crayons you were given. A GM could also shape he player experience, guide them away from areas you haven’t populated yet, etc. The only real downside was that the GM couldn’t play side by side with his buddies.

Building a world in those days was a labor of love, but labor it was. Grab the graph paper, get out your Monster Manual, put on your thinking cap and get to work. For a map junkie like me that was almost better than playing the game.

Enter the pc-based RPG and ultimately the MMO. All that “real time” game management and polyhedral dice rolling blissfully out the window, but along with that also went with a gamer’s ability to create.

I, for one, miss that creative process. Various FPS games have had level editors around for some time and modders have had a field day with creating cool levels and hosting servers where gamers at large could log on a frag in their world.

Would something like this work for an MMO? Could a player accessible MMO world editor provide enough creativity but still enough constraint to allow player-created modules to be stitched together in an MMO universe?

My World, My Rules

So how might this work? First of all, the overall game would need to provide a theme or genre that would allow for this kind of rolling content development. Planets in space as a paradigm seems an easy natural since there are thousands of worlds in the universe and with various space travel paradigms, player created planets/asteroids/starbases/relics/artifacts would be easily reachable.

Devs would have to provide a skeleton universe of key places to boot strap the universe. Exploration and colonization as an overarching theme seems a natural here. Throw in a good number of built-in races and factions and you have enough innate friction to create the heat and light necessary to make the universe alive.

This could conceivably be extended to a terrestrial world, but there would be more challenges. Would players create new landmass or only populate existing landmasses? I fear a world of ten thousands islands if not suitably constrained. Likewise, wall to wall player created towns wouldn’t do too much to create an immersive effect, so the planet approach might still work without creating an obvious speed bump transitioning between worlds.

Player-devs could restrict access to their worlds requiring faction, tribute or alliance before entry is permitted. Of course, the overall game design challenge is to provide a means of character advancement without allowing player-devs to simply create loot-raining theme parks which would distort the economy and provide a guild/corporation-only xp/gold/loot pimping ground.

Taking a page from the good old AD&D table top days, the creation process would not be so different. A map editor is a map editor, population of mobs would rely on reference to the virtual monster manual with the player dev controlling certain mob properties, maybe key loot and faction awards. Of course having lots to choose from here, and truly decent mob AI would be key.

Unlike the old table top days though, the player-dev would also be able to play in this world but there would have to be some balance. While its probably not cricket to have a player-dev benefit from plundering his own zone, that is still not so different than an experienced player re-running instanced content/boss mob encounters in any other game. A player-dev might know what the next jack-in-the-box mob around the corner might be, but he and his party of hardy adventurers will still need to defeat it and reap the rewards afforded and controlled by the game devs through loot tables, etc. associated with placeable mobs.

I think there would be an interesting social networking element to this as well. New worlds/zones would live and die by their popularity. Set up a popular interstellar trading post and tax visitors to your world. “Digg” this world in-game and watch your local economy flourish. You are the master of your domain. Build a dungeon or build a kingdom, ultimately players themselves will vote with their limited play time what worlds they want to visit. This truly would be an ever-changing and expanding universe. No heavy expansions needed. Tired of existing content? Build your own and share it with others. The ultimate in a player impacted universe.