earthx.org blog

Nice run-down of some Star Wars Galaxies economic stats from Raph Koster.

The changes in player orientation mean more newbs in Theed and Mos Eisley. The guild could develop recruiting techniques accordingly. Just look for newb droid units.

How could the shuttleport waits be more useful? There should be a whole airport vibe. Allow cooks to set up vendors and entertainers to heal in those zones and you have something a little more interesting.

I sold some organics and healed some today. My play has been a lot less guild-oriented recently, probably because I’ve been spending less time online. I healed fairly anonymously in the Theed hospital for a major part of the day. Got some beans on the market… I’m making good money off of that.

I don’t know if I’m particularly into bio-engineer. I may relinquish it and do a creature handler/doctor thing. I’m so fickle.

Getting ready to go to the lab. Today:

• Stay engaged with factions as you play. Think actively about the granularity and variation in that system.
• Check out the progress made with our city’s “militarization.”
• Poke around the remodeled Bestine if possible.
• Collect some DNA.
• Buy some grain from the Wookiee who’s collecting it for you.
• Sell some more beans and put some power in the harvester.
• Check out the new guild fishing cabin.

/. calls Max Payne 2 a “benchmark in video-game storytelling” and links to an interview with the writer. The interview is interesting, but I liked the Slashdotters’ comments the most.

I’ve been thinking more about what I wrote on City of Heroes and about what, exactly, I’m looking for from the game, what I think it should be doing.

City of Heroes is starting out at square one with heroes, and then adding villains in an expansion. This is groovy. But “hero/villain” as a binary moral category for superheroes hasn’t ever really worked; it elides too much of the range of moral categories that the denizens of superhero comic books have occupied and do occupy.

A few years ago, I taught a class called the Rhetoric of Superheroes, which built on the theory that superheroes and supervillains are, individually, deployed as distinct arguments: each character, as a symbol of morality, presents a position on what is and what should (or should not) be. Superman in the ’30s is not just a “hero” but a progressive social activist. The X-Men are not just “heroes” but an symbolized argument about discrimination, diversity, and change. Catwoman changes from villain to outlaw hero as popular understandings of gender relations change. And so on.

And that’s assuming that the heroes or villains as arguments are being suggested as moral absolutes, which in practice is rare. With the possible exception of the post-Congressional hearings, early Comics Code days of the ’50s, there have always been superheroes and villains who explicitly don’t fit the simple definitions: Spider-Man was initially in it for the money. Sub-Mariner helped us out in WWII but tried to take over New York several times after that. The Hulk has, over the years, been a petty criminal, a horndog, a reckless destroyer of property, a lunatic and a tyrant.

A translation of this genre into a persistent world game should not assume that the antagonistic positions in-game are a two-sided slam-dunk. It’s telling that superheroes fight each other an awful lot in comic books.

This is all speculation: CoH doesn’t have PvP, and the expansion is just a press release at this point. None of this is really relevant to the game as it plays right now. But I think it will become so, as the game grows and players are offered structured choices for moral positioning. The genre connections the game explicitly makes indicate thematic connections between the game and superhero comic books, and I think that players will, consciously or unconsciously, expect in-game mechanisms to replicate their imaginings of superhero comic books in the game. This requires structuring “superheroes” and “supervillains” as they function in that genre, not just as they are perceived from a position outside it.

This continuum of moral positions is going to enter into CoH regardless of how the rule system is structured. There’s already a neo-Confederate super-team in the game, for Pete’s sake; the player base have left moral absolutes way behind. But it would be, I think, a very good thing for the game if there were rule structures to accommodate this continuum within the game.

So how do you do it? Let’s get out of the genre analysis and talk about rules. PvP should not operate on binaries in the game: on/off, hero/villain. There should be a range of factions and of positions within a faction. Once again, this is something that I think SWG does well: there’s the Rebellion and the Empire, of course, but these two uber-factions are followed by many, many smaller factions: your faction position with regards to Jabba’s Army isn’t related to your position with regards to the Empire.

In addition, you have the option of being overt or covert as a Rebel or Imperial: full-on, open PvP or a less dangerous, but also less morally absolute “closeted” position. This analysis of SWG PvP makes an interesting argument against the covert/overt system. While I like several of the ideas, and am open to the idea of changes in the covert/overt system, I’d hate to see it done away with. This quote is telling:

Covert players and overt players do not understand each other very well. Coverts think all the overts are gankers who just like ruining people’s days. Overts think the coverts are mealy-mouthed wusses who are scared to really take sides. A typical overt complaint is that the overt was getting killed by a clump of Rebels while a covert fellow Imperial stood by and did nothing.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing; on the contrary, I think it’s good. This shows that SWG has implemented a system of moral compromises, and that social dynamics have grown from this system. Covert and overt members of the same faction shouldn’t get along seamlessly. They have made different choices in the game; those choices map to moral positions; those moral positions are in conflict. As long as this is, on some level, socially understood as part of the gameplay, that’s fun stuff to me.

A great City of Heroes/Villains can and should present many faction choices rather than just one. It can and should allow a player some freedom to define her character’s moral position in relationship to the world, even if that position is “thief with a heart of gold” or “damaged criminal-killing vigilante.” It can and should attempt to translate the core of the superhero genre rather than just its trappings.

It can start with a design question: how do you, in game rules, create a morality system in CoH that might approximate the range of moral positions occupied in Watchmen? In Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come? In nearly any Lee and Kirby/Lee and Ditko Marvel comic from the 1960’s? Go.

So I booted up test center to get a look at the new professions quests. My original experiences as a Novice Artisan way back when made me give it up pretty quickly; I was totally disoriented and the fun was lacking. I ended up picking up dancing and then combat because the activities were more straightforward… spent more than my share of time lost doing those at first too, though.

I’m running through Scout now, and I like the system. You are directed to a planet right after new player tutorial without a choice, which was surprising at first, but is nice really; it obviates picking a dead town at the get go. When you get to your starting spot (mine was Mos Eisley), you get a helper droid in your datapad. This droid walks you through your first profession tasks and gives you loot for completed tasks. I was taken through my first kill, my first crafting, my first camp. It’s a nice starter. I’m going to run it for Artisan next — there’s still stuff about the profession that eludes me.

I got into the City of Heroes beta a whole 48 hours before it ended. I managed to play a little, though. Initial impressions: the combat system is good. The missions system is nicely structured; I never grouped until the end but had a fun and structured time soloing. The embedded narrative (that is, the story on the Web site that is meant to inform our understanding of the game space) is very detailed, and though I’m not close to finishing it, what I have read reads like a symbolic retelling of the 60-70 years of North American mainstream super-hero comics history. The emergent fiction-making — the content, artifacts, meaning that a user can generate and persist in the shared space — isn’t really there yet, unless you count combat. I never thought I’d miss virtual money, but I do… there are power objects called “enhancements”, which are I think meant to be understood as a sort of currency, but I don’t really grok how they work in a market yet. There aren’t really mechanisms for user-created content in game yet, though the message boards actively encourage such content and actively encourage role-playing.

Last night, the end-of-beta blowout, was an alien invasion.

Alien Invasion Screenshot

It was a visceral, cast-of-thousands pile on, with superheroes galore fighting Independence Day-style alien warriors. It was pretty much a big stress test: how much combat and activity can we get going in very small areas? Can we handle the spikes without a bunch of lag and failures? The system did really well: even at the craziest I had less lag than I have at the Theed Starport on an afternoon with mild to modest traffic. And everyone enjoyed it: the chat box was full of people who, apparently, decided to buy the game right then. It was truly an example of group spectacle, shiny and flashy and crowded.

And, at the moment it was happening, I felt that visceral energy and had a sense that I was in the middle of something big. The aliens were deadly, our fight was valiant, the explosions were great. But I don’t know if that’s something that could sustain me, not when I can’t build a Hall of Justice, locate my team in a shared history of the space, make a mark in-game beyond NPC’s telling me “You are really some kind of hero, $heroName”.

City of Heroes has superheroes as a genre right: it’s agonistic and colorful and goes boom. Additionally, it has a great system for users to customize an avatar, to contribute individually through character creation. But I think it needs mechanisms for creativity beyond that. It needs more functions to allow players to create, to use that rich communal history of superhero comics reading, response and recreation. Right now, players just bust the bad guys up within the bounds of a fairly rigid and top-heavy story system. There’s not even space for moral ambiguity… you can’t not be a traditional fight-the-bad-guys hero, even though superhero comics have been complicating that paradigm since the 1960s.

This is still fun in the short term, but to use a superhero comics metaphor, it’s not Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman, it’s not even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It’s like the ad-copy Spider-Man comic you get with a box of cereal, appropriating all the signs and conventions of superhero comics but missing the individual energy that makes a comic good.

Superhero comics are work-for-hire: countless creative minds entering the system and changing it with a constant stream of new content and output. As intellectual property, they are top-down branded systems; as textual forms, they are bottom-up systems of aggregated and continually-aggregating information. If you’ve been a comics fan since an early age, you know that the imaginary stage right after dreaming of being a comic book hero is dreaming of being a comic book maker, of inserting your voice into the system.

The dream of the comics fan is to make good superhero comics, and good superhero comics are riffs on the genre, not passive repeatings of the genre. Riffs here, like in jazz, require spaces where the player can stretch out and innovate from a predefined template. To me, good persistent world games are very similar to comics in this aspect, and the affinity between the two forms makes the current lack of mechanisms for user creation in CoH a sticking point for me.

This is me, though, the guy that thinks SWG is fun.

Alien Invasion Thread on CoH forums

/. article on the invasion

Update 4/26: Wanted to leaven this with the acknowledgement that MMOGs are always works in progress and, in my opinion, shouldn’t be judged too harshly at the moment of release, b/c they’re always going to change significantly in the months immediately following. I think I like SWG so much largely because I came to it later. So I’ll be following CoH with interest, and I think news like this announcement of the upcoming City of Villains is very encouraging.

Referencing Timothy Burke’s “The Mystery of SWG”.

After a few months playing this game, I have a little more insight into Tim Burke’s commentary on SWG… most of which is going to make it into a diss chapter and later papers, but just some brief comments here:

I have to disagree with his thoughts on user vs. designer-created content, though a lot of my perspective may just have to do with personal preference, or with the game as I’ve played it, which differs from the game as of Burke’s writing, especially in the case of player cities, which came online nearly a month after Burke’s datestamp on “Mystery of SWG”.

The player city I live in is rich with user-generated content, laden with an imagined history true to the game and to the mythos of the Expanded Universe (Wookiees in exile) and active in the player-driven, though developer-overseen, Galactic Civil War. To me, it has a life and a creative energy that a top-down space — the Mos Eisley Cantina, or Jabba’s Palace, or even an “official” Wookiees-in-exile town — could never match.

From Troops to the Jar Jar-free edit of Phantom Menace, fans of Star Wars have appropriated the universe and used its elements to create their own artifacts. At this point in time (that is, our time, not Star Wars’ diegetic time), post-Episode 2, I would argue that Star Wars fans are often more comfortable with their own interpretations than those reflected in “official” artifacts. I think Burke is absolutely right when he says “at least some of your player base comes to you quite legitimately with a very specific mental model of the narratives and experiences they would like to have within that gameworld”, but I draw a very different conclusion… that player base should be given the best possible tools for actuating those narratives and experiences themselves rather than simply having narratives and experiences delivered to them, particularly given the history of “official” narratives not conforming to the very specific mental model that Star Wars fans have.

Again, this reflects some personal opinions, and I can definitely see the opposite point of view. Ideally, a MMOG like SWG is going to strike a balance between embedded and emergent content. I’d just like to advocate for emergent content, even in — maybe especially in — this particular fictional universe.

However, after finally making my way to Novice Bio-Engineer just to face another long crafting tree, I agree with this comment from Burke:

to shunt people into non-persistent activities when they want to have fun, and to insist on making them grind when they want to make a mark on the gameworld, when they want to matter within it, is to indulge in an ultimately self-destructive sense of the genre?s possibilities.

I think crafting and the player-generated economy are great aspects of the game. But the “grinding” required to become viable in this economy as a crafter is tough… especially so because crafting generates a flat wizard interface that sharply removes you from the immersive space of the world. A newb crafter is spending a significant amount of time essentially blocked from the world as a social or exploratory space. After thoroughly enjoying the path to viability through exploration as a scout, I found this kind of alienating, and wanted to automate it rather than undergo it. It seems appropriate to quote Raph Koster’s own game laws:

Macroing, botting, and automation

No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

Corollary:

Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.

This may be a personal thing, though: a Master Creature Handler (exploring, hunting) in the guild now wants to take on Novice Artisan (crafting). Go figure.