Is it just me or is Scion’s design philosophy: “Let’s build the ugliest damn thing we can and young people will buy it because it won’t look like a car their parents would drive?”

Picture credit: me.

Back to games. It has been spoken by the prophet that the future of shooters is RPGs. What does that mean?

I was having this discussion with someone at the last IGDA meeting. I was talking about how soulless RPGs have become and that WoW had increased the problem of context-free grinding. Her response was that grinding is a fundamental aspect of RPGs. I took that as a challenge, and started listing some of my favorite RPGs where grinding was unnecessary. Her response was that those weren’t really RPGs. I guess if your definition of RPG is that it is a game with grinding then, sure, grinding is a fundamental aspect of RPGs.

I bring this up to point out that the definition of an RPG changes greatly from player to player. “RPG-elements” is even more loaded requiring an additional layer of abstraction. Madden has player attributes, leveling-up and so forth. Is it an RPG?

So what does it mean that RPGs are the future of shooters? More story/dialog? Less reliance of twitch mechanics? Experience points? Grinding? Classes? Special items? Blond androgynous heros?

Genres are collections of aesthetics and mechanics. I believe that the term “RPG” has become an empty vessel and no longer contains any sort of mapping to “role-playing” or even specific sets of mechanics.

It being Independence Day and all, I figured I’d do something civic and patriotic. So I did some research on the voting records of our wonderful representatives of the last ten years regarding some of the most egregious power grabs.

Did you know that only two representatives voted against the Iraq War, bank bailouts, “stimulus package”, Omnibus spending and cap-and-trade? Those two are Congressmen John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. However, there are thirty-one who voted in favor of all five.

The numbers get better if you extend the analysis to only penalize the representatives for voting for the bills (this eliminates striking someone who was not in office at the time of the Iraq War or TARP votes).  There are then fifty-eight who qualify. I don’t like this analysis enough because it only covers the Democrats’ sponsored GIANT waste programs and not both of the ones conceived by the previous Republican administration. So these fifty-six are untested by the party machine breathing down their necks. Twenty-eight of these were around to vote No on TARP, so they get partial credit.

But still, it’s really depressing. Only 2 of 245 that have been around since 2002 voted straight against while 31/245 voted straight for. That’s a factor of 15:1. There’s only the possibility of maybe a total of 30 fiscally respectable representatives out of the 435. Not even 10%.

I’ve uploaded the spreadsheet I used to do the tracking so you can add or delete your own peeves and make the state of American freedom more or less grave.

It’s got what plants crave.

As you all know, I loves me my Zynga games. That’s why I was excited when I saw Farmville advertised during Mafia Wars as released. Unfortunately, Farmville‘s dynamic is essentially waiting which usually isn’t really a fun activity. Given the choice between farming and La Cosa Nostra, clearly the latter is more appealing.

You take the role of a farmer and lay down SimCity-esque isometric plots which you can then fill with any of a number of crops. You then wait for the crops to grow. When they are ready, you harvest them and get coins so you can start anew. Whereas in Mafia Wars the different jobs provide different rewards and outputs (fill up the job mastery meter, get loot items), the different crops in Farmville provide no differentiation. All plants provide same benefit, only a matter of scale. The soybeans provide greatest return/cost, so I plant those. There is no reason to plant corn or strawberries or any of the others.

If you don’t harvest a crop in time, the crop withers and rots. This is a surprising use of negative reinforcement in an extremely casual game. Instead of rewarding players each time they come back, the game punishes players for not coming back. It is a subtle difference that has enormous impact on the players. Most games of this type use a sort of contra-positive reinforcement where you simply miss out on gains rather than incur losses by not signing on. The lesson is taught in decision science: people would rather miss out on gains than incur losses, even if they are the same economically.

Negative Reinforcement: Farmville – Plants die if you don’t log in to harvest them in time.
Contra-positive Reinforcement: Mafia Wars – There is an opportunity cost to having not logged in if your energy meter is full.
Positive Reinforcement: Parking Wars – You can only ticket people in your lanes if you constantly log in to check.

Then there is this cow.

I hate her. One of the first things I did was buy her. It cost most of my money, yet she has no benefit. I figure: Oh, a cow. She is expensive. Her price must be proportional to her benefit. She must make milk that I can sell at market. No dice. She just stands there, mocking me. In a pure min/maxing sense, the value of an in-game asset is the discounted future benefit it provides. In the simplest analysis, a Mega-Casino in Mafia Wars gives me $300,000/hour. I can calculate a break-even. If the Mega-Casino costs me $30 million, I know that in 100 hours I will have made my money back and every thing else is gravy. If I plan on playing more than a week, this is a good investment.

The exception to the rule is cosmetic changes. I could spend money on something that provides no future return if I get utility from the decoration aspect of it. For instance, some people spend hours upon hours looking for certain equippable items in WoW because it will make their character look cool. In cases where the item provides no game benefit, it is usually clear that the item is purely cosmetic. Rather than deriving benefit from the mechanics of the item, they derive benefit from the item’s appearance.

The cow does neither. I can almost smell the methane.

Now, I trust that like all Zynga games that this is a work in progress. But right now, the game is so bare-bones that it doesn’t feel ready for release. The tipping point in Mafia Wars came when they added job mastery – that wasn’t in the original release. This changed the gameplay dynamic from min/maxing on the same job to trying a bit of everything. Collectibles helped. Achievements helped. One can imagine that these are in the pipe for Farmville.

If not, well, I’m available for freelancing, Zynga.

5:49pm – Enter classroom take seat against back wall. Pros: AC connection for laptop. Cons: Instructor speaks soft and slightly-broken English. Pro: He reads all of his slides to us anyway, so I really don’t need to hear him.

5:57pm – Classmates discussing whether the “attendance will be monitored” on the syllabus is enforceable or not. Current Diet Coke Level: Sufficient

6:06pm – Professor hurries in. Asks if anyone did the homework problem. No one did because he didn’t assign one. He is surprised and shocked.

6;14pm – He’s ended roughly six hundred sentences with “…, right?” or “…, you know?” just to mix it up when reading off his Powerpoint slides.

6:25pm – Actually counted the “you know”s per sentence. In my sample – 0.75 per sentence. This is a Key Financial Ratio.

6:28pm – He is now doing the inverse of the reading Powerpoints technique – he is writing what he says verbatim on the blackboard. Side note: we still use blackboards?

6:37pm – He will give us the formulas on the exam? Now he’s just playing Good Cop.

7:17pm – May have blacked out for the last forty minutes.

7:20pm – My favorite use of numbers is cases where they are strictly for the presentation of false precision. Welcome to the MBA program.

7:39pm – The vocal majority of this class doesn’t understand the basics of stocks. Actual question: “How does the stock market make money? Do they collect the earnings from the companies?” I’m pretty sure they are targeting these folks for pyramid schemes. Or Amway.

7:44pm – THIS IS NOT A CLINIC ON HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET, PEOPLE. However, I do welcome the lack of reading from Powerpoint slides.

8:00pm – From the intricacies of the stock market to the arithmetic order of operations. Multiply before you add? Slow down, Speed Racer, I’m getting whiplash.

8:31pm – Prof: “Don’t blame me, I didn’t design the program.”

8:49pm – Spent roughly the last fifteen minutes looking for clever domain names on godaddy.com.

8:58pm – I didn’t buy the $40 calculator yet so I cannot participate in this portion of the class. Operating said calculator is challenging the class moreso than the earlier stock discussion. Current Diet Coke Level: Troubling.

9:04pm – Rules of class have broken down into solliquies on how to use a calculator. I begin to fear for my safety. I file a Last Will and Testament online.

9:13pm – NATO troops come in and break up class. I’m done.