Leveling Up – Day 11 – Biometrics
So I dropped Brain Age. That game’s dumb anyway.
EA Sports Active 2 has kept my attention surprisingly well, though. Haven’t missed a session yet, even got the girlfriend to play along with one or two. Turns out I really like working out at home – I’m not self conscious, I can shower right away, and I don’t have to lug stuff around.
I’m not sure if I’m taking a lot of game design lessons from EASA2, but it is interesting how it’s the only game on my shelf that has a non-caucasian person on the cover. I’d like to think that says more about the gaming industry than myself…
One thing I have been thinking about is the bundled arm-strap heart rate monitor that comes with the game. It reminds me of Gabe Newell’s comments about biometrics playing an important role in the future of gaming. Adding a simple heart-rate sensor pad to a controller would be pretty inexpensive, and completely unobtrusive. Maybe we’ll see it on a mobile device, like a smart phone or a tablet.
You could see what events and areas are getting players excited, your game could react if a player is getting too complacent. The Dead Space games have heartbeat effects woven into their soundtracks, that could follow the player’s BPM. Imagine playing a multiplayer game of Aliens vs. Predator and seeing exactly how panicked the enemy Marines are.
Leveling Up – Day 1
I’m starting a little experiment to see how much I can better myself, using games as my main tool and motivation.
I’ve chosen two games to help me get started: EA Sports Active 2 on the PS3 and Brain Age 2 on the Nintendo DS. I was going to wait until the fall for Ubisoft’s Rocksmith to come out and complete the mind/body/soul trifecta, but I’m too impatient and already suck at guitar. I’ll be dabbling in other stuff too, including cooking games/apps like Leçons de Cuisine, a super French-ass cooking trainer for the DS, and various iPhone apps. More suggetions are always welcome.
But most importantly, I’d also like to evaluate and talk about these games from a design perspective. How do they motivate and encourage the player? How is the presentation? Can self-help titles like these teach us anything about designing our “normal” games?
Here are my starting stats, following my my first round of exercises on EASA2 and BA2:
BODY
My starting weight is 178 lbs (80.7 kg), which gives me an approximate BMI of 25.5 (source). Damn! If I was an inch taller I’d be in the “Normal weight” range, but for now I’m “overweight”.
I’ve started the 9-week program on EASA2 which is comprised of 4 exercise sessions a week. Today I completed my first one in 27 minutes, burned 161 calories and ran 0.34 miles (0.5 km). Max heart rate was 172 bpm and average was 125 bpm.
MIND
This was my first time turning this game on in over 2 years: virual Dr. Kawashima’s disappointment in me was palpable. Brain Age: 35 (real age 26).
Command and Conquercraft
My high school was a private French-Catholic institution in small Saskatchewan farming town, so it was almost impossible for the geeks on campus to get our gaming fix. But on Friday afternoons, one of us would make sure to leave the computer lab’s window ajar during class. Later that night (we lived in dorms on campus), we would sneak out and slide the window open from outside. We’d crawl through and, keeping all the lights off and our voices down, install Starcraft spawns and play LAN games late into the night.
Now I’m a goddamn adult with his own PC who can play Starcraft 2 as much as he wants without having to resort to any form of trespassing. But I haven’t just been playing the game, I’ve also been watching casted replays, diving into /r/starcraft, and devouring dozens of Sean “Day9” Plott’s super-cerebral tutorial videos. Starcraft 2 has become a pretty big part of my life…
Hm, maybe they had a reason to lock us out of there…
VICTORY GAMES
Recently EA unveiled the formation of Victory Games, their new strategy label. Along with it they also announced a reboot of the Command & Conquer series. One can easily speculate that Starcraft 2‘s critical and financial success influenced this decision.
This reboot might seem a bit premature, since the last C&C game came out about a year ago. But C&C really lost its way long before then, never having regained the audience and importance it had 10+ years ago. EA has shown that they’re not above taking inspiration from Activision-Blizzard’s other hits (*cough*Medal of Honor*cough*), so are they setting their sights on Starcraft 2 now?
C&C was my first love, long before Starcraft 2 introduced me to a life of crime. So understandably I am excited by the idea of a reboot and some evolution, but I hope the original series’ gameplay and spirit are carried over. But what does that mean exactly?
THE TIBERIUM MUST FLOW…
Real-time strategy games revolve around the control of resources. Westwood Games, Victory’s predecessor, invented the genre with Dune 2, so it’s not surprising to see that all of their games would follow the same resource scheme: renewable fields of a Spice-like substance, collected by a heavy harvester vehicles.
This is much different than Blizzard’s games: carefully-placed finite resources of gold/gas and minerals/lumber. Listen to a pro Starcraft 2 game and you’ll see how this affects gameplay. Each map is littered with a number of empty “expansions”, carefully designed spots where resources are placed and waiting for a Town Hall-equivalent to be constructed. The player who can safely expand the most has the highest income and can afford to overrun his enemy.
Tiberium spreads uncontrollably and is poisonous to infantry, so you can’t “expand” into it, building your base around it. This means your Harvesters have to venture out, away from your defences. It also means that your income doesn’t come in a steady stream, but in periodic bursts.
Another way that the C&C games differentiate themselves is that unless you clear out a field completely, Tiberium will regenerate on its own. If you pace yourself it is an unlimited resource. This could be a great gameplay mechanic that leads to some interesting questions: do you clean out a nearby, easily-defensible Tiberium field for immediate resource gain, or do you maintain a slower and more sustainable, long-term approach?
PACING
The C&C games tends to have a slower and much more pensive pace than Blizzard’s games. This is due to several factors: larger map size, slower unit movement, longer build times and a zoomed-out view of the action.
I don’t think this makes for a less exciting game necessarily, in fact for this can be a good thing. (If a fast pace was all that mattered to spectators, why would there be a channel devoted solely to golf?) It gives you a game that is less reliant on insane hand speed and superhuman reation timing, and more on macro strategies like army composition and positioning. Not that this would be better or worse than how Blizzard does things, just different.
PRESENTATION GOES A LONG WAY
(I’m not talking about the talking-head FMV sequences… those were great, but it’s time to let those go.)
With big-budget affairs like Korea’s Global Starcraft League and the upcoming North American Star League, the RTS genre is probably the biggest spectator e-sport out there. I think that there’s room for C&C in this field, and that it might be a great RTS for new spectators as well.
As I mentioned before, C&C played out at a pace that was easier to manage and watch. In addition to that, its aesthetic and setting made it an easier game to understand. While some of the games did get very science-fiction-y in later iterations, or just plain ridiculous (armoured Russian bears?),you know what a flame tank does just from the name… a Corruptor… less so.
CONCLUSION
So these are a few of the things that make the C&C games stand out: a unique resource collection mechanic, methodical pacing and a fun, comprehensible setting. I’m positive that we have enough players and spectators out there to handle another big RTS, so here’s hoping Victory Games makes it happen.
Comedy in Games
Great comedies leverage the strengths of their medium to get laughs. About 80% of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel is hilarious descriptions, turns of phrase and nearly-irrelevant Guide entries. But a movie like Airplane! would not make a very funny book; a lot of the gags are visual, or based on the actors’ stone-faced delivery. In short, Hitchiker’s Guide gets laughs by telling, Airplane! gets laughs by showing.
So while funny cutscenes and clever writing will always have a place in games, we’re really just copy-pasting another medium’s storytelling tools into ours. Tools that are just delivery services for someone else’s jokes. But games can be more than that, they are in the enviable and unique position of being joke creation mechanisms.
Spore could have been hilarious. I did enjoy creating creatures and seeing how the AI would find a way to animate them. Too bad there was not much else to do. Imagine if something like this was combined with the detail and the complexity of interaction available in The Sims! I’d be be locking purple galloping penis-creatures in doorless rooms while armless fishmen struggle to open the fridge.
Abstraction is also be a valuable tool. After all, if we are generating events and situations randomly, it would serve us to “zoom out” a bit and intentionally make things less realistic and more open to interpretation. Recently I was enthralled by a demonstration of Introversion Software’s upcoming game, Subversion. There’s a long but awesome demonstration of the game available. You should watch the whole thing, but if you’re in a rush the relevant part here is at 18:00.
In the demonstration, Chris’ men start waving AK-47′s around the lobby of a bank. The customers raise their hands and begin freaking out, but they follow his commands. One of the guards, however, bugs out and doesn’t move at all. In a high-fidelity, realistic game this bug would destroyed the immersion. The robbers decide to shoot the guard’s gun out of his hand (and pop another bullet in his leg for good measure), but he just stands there, bleeding profusely on the floor. All I could think was that this was the most badass guard of all time. Abstraction saved the day.
And we can’t talk about funny games without talking about ragdolls.
There will always be something funny about watching a man fall off a thing. Even better if he hits some other things on the way down. Team Fortress 2 is one of about a bajillion games that use ragdolls, but they really take advantage of them. Faces will continue to animate for a few seconds after death, leading to some hilarous screaming emotes like the one above. The Sniper’s Hunstman arrows will pin bodies to a wall, hanging the corpses like… wow, that paragraph is getting dark, let’s to move on.
I wish TF2 would do with killcams in-game, like a “best of” gallery at the end of a round. But I think all ragdoll physics are handled client-side, and might not sync up with all players. Ah well.
BIXI BIXI BIXI
I finally got a BIXI key last week, and have been biking to and from work. Subsequently, I noticed that Gameloft is uphill from my apartment. So it’s a good workout, and when I change t-shirts in the bathroom when I arrive I can pretend I’m Superman in a telephone booth. So really, it’s fun from start to finish.
For those from out of town, or the exceptionally oblivious, BIXI is Montréal’s public bicycle sharing system. Users buy a month or year-long pass, or can pay-as-they-go with a credit card. It was launched last year in Montréal, and has since spread to Ottawa and London, among other places. Like many progressive eco-friendly community socialist projects, Europe’s been doing it for a while.
Anyhow, BIXI’S front page is currently showing off the “2009 Top 25 BIXIclists”, the twenty-five folks who used the service most. A leaderboard of sorts. So what other game design concepts can be used to improve BIXI? Basically, what incentives can we create to encourage users to use the service more, and to make it more efficient?
Already users have access to “My BIXI Space”, a page where they can check out their bike-riding stats and history. The simplest stat shown is the user’s total distance traveled, in kilometers. Why don’t we turn this into a currency, a point system? With each km traveled, users earn points that can later be redeemed for prizes, like water bottles, safety gear, or a free subscription for friends and family.
Or just for bragging rights; let’s make a leaderboard. Who has biked the most this year/week/today? Who took the longest trip? Who’s fastest? Or, on a personal and less competitive way, personal high score tables could encourage solo “players” to beat their own personal week-to-week distance.
The site also keeps track of every trip you’ve taken, station-to-station. Google Maps/Earth keeps track of altitude, so why not keep show who has climbed the most hills today, or who is the downhill champion? That leads us naturally to our old friend, the Achievement System! You biked 100km, ding! You’ve climbed a total of 25km, ding!
So that encourages players to use the service, so let’s now find a way to encourage users to make it run more smoothly.
A friend of mine, who is a much bigger sustainatarian than I, was telling me that some people are unimpressed with the service, due in part to the fleet of pickup trucks required to shuttle bikes from overcrowded stations to empty ones. We could give players bonus points for docking a bike at an otherwise empty station, reducing the need for these trucks. We’ll place “bounties” on the website, encouraging users to bring bikes from overcrowded stations to empty ones. Personally that wouldn’t encourage me to bike to Peel and walk home for a few points, but it couldn’t hurt.
I’ll be honest. Part of me feels kind of weird doing this. Like I’m helping Jesse Schell’s terrifying vision of the future become a reality. This whole blog post is about manipulation. But is it wrong? I’m hoping to inject a little more fun into a service I already use, and one that helps me stay in shape and pollute less. If this ever turns into a spammy Facebook game I will throw myself under a solar-powered bus.
Back from the dead
Greetings,
Since December I have moved apartments twice, broken my PC, purchased a new PS3 and 360, recorded an episode of the podcast and learned how to cook Mexican food. I’ve been busy. But now that I have some free time again and the sun is shining, it’s time to stay in and write blog posts.
But the biggest/most relevant news in my life is that I am no longer working as a Localisation Bug Specialist at Gameloft. The career gods heard my pleas and made me a Technical Game Designer at Gameloft Montreal. Obviously I can’t talk about what team I’m on, but I should be able to share news in a few months. Here’s a hint: it’s a game and it will be enjoyable.
Episode 5 is here!
You can download the MP3 here. [Right-click to Save As] We talk about Heavy Rain, high five sensors, the Hippocratic Oath of video games and a certain little one-button RTS.
This week’s episode features Misters Henk Boom and Matthew Gallant. In addition to being great writers and thinkers, they are 2 of the 5 guys behind No Fun Games, the makers of Pax Britannica. You can download their game for free from Matthew or Henk’s sites.
Episode 4 is here!
Episode 4 is now online and can be found here! Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes, and leave us a review! Questions, comments and love letters can be sent here. And hey, while you’re at it you can follow us on Twitter.
Now on iTunes!
Wow, I submit the podcast to Apple before going to bed, and wake up to find an approval email in my inbox already. The show must just be so amazing they couldn’t wait to approve it… right?
Anyways, you can search for us in iTunes, or just click this link here. Please subscribe, rate us, and leave a review!
The RSS feed is fixed
…and you can find it here. Now that we have a respectable number of episodes available, I’m going to submit the show to the iTunes podcast listings. I’ll let you know when you can find us there, but in the meantime you can add us yourselves using their “Subscribe to Podcast” option, under Advanced.