Since I linked to it the other day and since I am filling my wall with posts on it, I thought I’d draw more attention to Ian Bogost’s brilliant distillation of social games called Cow Clicker and his subsequent explanation of the inspiration for it on his blog.

In short: you click on a cow to get points. Why do you need points? Well… you can compare with your friends! And you can buy cutely named Mooney to get different cow types!

I was talking to my fiancee yesterday who is a huge user of all these social game doodads and she was distressed that her dog in Farmville had ran away because she wasn’t there to click on it or feed it or whatever you do in that game these days. Cow Clicker is very lax in that particular interpretation of the “Social” Dogma. If you don’t click your cow, nothing bad happens to you, which is one of the key psychological footholds of the genre. You don’t lose anything and you don’t let your friends down. It’s the sense of obligation, of slavery to these mindless activities that makes me find Facebook games so insidious, especially after having worked on one. Not only are your friends not human beings but resources, but conversely you are a cog in their machine. It’s surprising for me to say that Cow Clicker isn’t insidious enough. Maybe that is the point? Maybe because we expect it to be more insidious that just shows how miserable the state of affairs truly is?

Cow Clicker is more interesting satire than, say, Progress Quest simply because instead of making a statement that looks like the antecedent (as in the latter), it attempts to fully emulate its target and strip it down enough that its internals show but not so bare that it fails to emulate the same mechanics and dynamics.

Whatever this school of design is that eschews the fuck-the-users mentality, it needs a name and a little badge that I can put on my profile and level up.

Power Planets is a great example of theme matching dynamics and a rare example of a Facebook game worth your time. You control a one-dimensional planet with limited resources and attempt to build up a civilization hopefully without fouling up the environment. You do this by unlocking tech in a nicely sized tech-tree and placing buildings and power plants in tactical locations.

The reason Power Planets works so well where loads of civ building games have failed is simply because it has a theme that is strong, but isn’t heavy-handed. You are free to muck up the world in the pursuit of luchre and the game makes little moral objection to the choice with the exception of animation of coughing and dying residents. It doesn’t lead you down a path of eco-righteousness – it lets you decide what that is through the mechanics.

For instance, I wanted to research to get Universities because they provide a lot of points per hour. But to do so, I needed a good chunk of money. So I built some fume-spewing Upgraded Factories powered by cheap, abundant and dirty as sin coal power. Completely within the so-called “Magic Circle”, I justified this – yeah, it is dirty and all, but it’s for the greater good. I need the Universities.

Renewable resources are hopelessly underpowered until you get the research to unlock more futuristic technologies. But the only way to unlock those technologies is to have a lot of money and the only way to have a lot of money is to essentially build a lot of polluting buildings. The parallel lessons to real situations, while neccessarily simplistic, are striking.

But the clever twist in Power Planets that makes it unlike every other building sim out there is that you hand off your planet to someone else every two days and receive a stranger’s. How many times in polluting will you look at your coal reserves, see 40 hours of coal remaining and know that it is someone else’s problem, plunging ahead not worrying about the future?

One building you can create is a Monument that houses your Facebook picture. Future caretakers of that world cannot remove or move the monument and it takes up a valuable space on the planet. Putting it on a useful resource or in a valuable power plant’s range is the ultimate in narcissism, but the game makes no value judgment on its own.

In a genre full of contrived mechanics (Why can I only click my cow every six hours? “Well, because we want you to come back” doesn’t fit any theme but manipulation), Power Planets strives as simple, fun and full of meaning.

I’m not going to continue my posts about Airport Rush for the time being. I had a fantastic playtest session with some very talented designers at Eric Zimmerman‘s playtest group yesterday and I think I am going to make some major changes. While this is dangerous to do a month before I take the game to GenCon, I think it is absolutely necessary.

It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.

There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.

It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.

I’ll be typing up part three of my board games post sometime later this week when I have time. I had friends come up over the holiday and we went to Central Park, MoMa, the waffle truck, played Dominion, Puerto Rico and Le Havre,  played at Dave & Busters, went shopping for Chinese junk on Canal Street, saw Avenue Q, saw the 4th of July Fireworks on the Hudson, went to Liberty Island (I took a great photo of the Statue with my phone that I am using as my wallpaper now. I’ll upload it later) and had delicious food in a number of places. It was a busy weekend!

This short post is to tell you about a gem of a game I played through on Thursday. It is Telltale’s pilot of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. If you like the Professor Layton games, then Puzzle Agent is familiar. It is a point-and-click adventure game sans inventory management, where the challenges come from brain teasers, logic puzzles and riddles that are interspersed with the story.

The pilot was great, but leaves on a bit of a To Be Continued note, so I’d be very sad if folks didn’t scoop it up in enough quantity to merit a whole season. I felt that the puzzles were more fair than in the latest Layton game (in that, some puzzles could be interpreted in multiple ways leading to incorrect correct answers). But the real draw here is the ridiculous writing and voice acting. I’ve found the voice acting in the Sam and Max games (of what I have played, at least) to be a bit monotonous. Plus there is a wonderful surprise that breaks the veil of puzzle and story that I will leave for you to discover.

Dear Kinect devs: I do not want to do simple binary actions with complex interpreted gestures.

Let’s say you have a menu select gesture where you have to wave your hand and hold it up for a second. If I have a n step-depth menu tree and it takes two seconds to select with a gesture versus 6 frames to select via button press, it is likely to take 10*n longer to get anywhere I want to go using gestures versus the old button system. If your menu tree takes six steps like a “Play Now” game of Madden, then you’ve increased my time to get into the game by ninefold, not to mention any additional interpretation time or false interpretations.

I can use a gesture to open a car door in Forza. Great. Why do I want to do that? To show off the technology or for increased enjoyment?

How about button presses versus gestural gameplay? We’ve seen this on the Wii already. Shaking the sword in Twilight Princess was inferior than the button presses used in the Gamecube version. Shaking to spin in Madden/NCAA Wii was vastly inferior to the button presses on its next-gen brethren. But aiming via tilting the Wiimote with our bow in the aforementioned Twilight Princess or using the MotionPlus to putt in Tiger Wii were much better applications of new tech. The tech is not good or bad, but applications of the tech can be.

Let’s learn from our mistakes. Gestural methods can create new outlets for gameplay. You can’t do EA Active with button presses and it was a creative success. If Kinect creates new gameplay methods, like it seems to in Dance Central, then the tech is being used appropriately.

There’s some great stuff being produced, just don’t let the tech tail wag the gameplay/usability dog.

I was setting up a game of Power Grid this weekend and thought I was incredibly clever:

The other players weren’t as entertained as I.

Extra Lives’ subtitle is “Why Video Games Matter”, which is sort of inappropriate because the text itself does a fairly poor job of making any kind of argument. The book is at its best in the early chapters, particularly the one about Resident Evil, exercising what is awkwardly called “The New Games Journalism”. Bissell unfortunately plays up to the stereotypes of gamers: underachievement, mixing real and artificial relationships and addiction (the tepid Grand Theft Auto IV chapter also details his addiction to cocaine).

The book is essentially a collection of essays, one of which was published in The New Yorker and which I complained about last year upon reading it for being too gee-whiz. His chapter on Braid falls for the same sort of fetishism, but the Far Cry 2 chapter which interviews Clint Hocking is surprisingly adroit at addressing what was unique about the underrated title.

If the thesis of the book is “Why Games Matter”, then it is only touched upon in a very meta way. Indeed, the quality of the prose in the book is vivid. If game reviews read like this, I’d be more apt to actually read them. A better subtitle might have been, “Why Games Are Trying to Matter”, because the pathetic swings at trying to rationalize his addiction leaves a sorry-feeling miasma over the whole book. But I don’t think the book was for me. It was for non-gamers. So perhaps I am unqualified to take his book as a softcore polemic towards the Eberts of the world.

I’m being hard on it.The book is entertaining at times and I found myself highlighting all over the early chapters for its more general insights.

Here, on my arch-nemesis, tutorials:

It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book.

On Resident Evil and utterly stupid stories:

[It] helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization [...] But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

On quantity of detail not being the definition of story:

For many gamers [...] and game designers, story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise creative achievement of any number of games.

When the author tries to dig deeper and find some interconnecting bonds, he fails. Perhaps the author is too ashamed of his addiction that he is desperately trying to attach meaning to it in oblique ways. Overall, the work is entertaining despite not really addressing a core thesis in a meaningful way.

Many games are justifiably criticized for having a “thrown-in” story. You’ve played these before – games where the story is so full of holes, or presented so poorly that it seemed like an afterthought. These games start with the play mechanics and once a fun experience is wrought, a story is shoehorned in to add context. These can still be good games, yet the converse is rarely held highly by gamers and reviewers.

Some very successful games are like this – putting the gameplay cart before the story horse. Do you think that Rockstar started with the idea of the plight of an eastern European immigrant learning to adapt with a foreign culture? Or did they start with mechanics: a living city, carjacking, police chases, helicopter rides, etc. and add the story later? It isn’t pejorative to say a game’s development starts with mechanics – it is simply a different development strategy.

In Alan Wake the story is front and center – so much that the game’s “episodes” add punctuation points to gameplay setting up “cliffhangers” at key story points. This is interesting. Cliffhangers make sense in television. The story in television dramas has to fit in a predefined time block and it cannot be guaranteed that the viewer will return for the next episode. So they leave with a question that must be answered in the hopes that the viewer will come back. Games like Alan Wake don’t have that limitation. The consumer has already bought the disc. There is no predefined episode length. They can play right through.

But the cliffhangers serve an important psychological goal – or at least they did in my case. Despite it being a device used specifically to draw player attention, it is where I stopped playing. Was this a mental cue that I picked up from years of watching television? Perhaps. But these episode breaks served as a cue to portion out the experience evenly. Many reviews that complain about the “sameness” of the gameplay may have rushed through and ignored these natural stopping points. Throughout the day after playing it, I’d wonder about the cliffhangers and come back with a renewed interest and drive to continue.

Back to the issue of story preceding gameplay. The gameplay is repetitive. But this serves the story in the same way the repetitive gameplay serves the story in Half-Life 2. Alan has a particular problem he is facing and for him to swap genres or wildly increase the breadth of mechanics in order to increase the breadth of gameplay (as happens in GTA, RPGs, etc.) would be putting gameplay before story.

You play as the plumber Mario and your goal is to save the beautiful Princess from the evil Koopa menace. Only Alan Wake isn’t as sacchrine. Mario is a New York writer. The Princess is your nyctophobic prize. The Taken are just as ill-defined as the Koopa Troopas. But it is a maturation on the same beats.

Some have complained that the game doesn’t follow the same horror tropes and is thus less scary. But these tropes apply in different ways to games that are story then gameplay versus games (like Resident Evil) that are heavily gameplay then story.

Additionally, the game is self-described as “thriller” not “horror”. Horror is meant to scare, first and foremost where thriller is meant to cause anxiety. So the string cues that let the player know that Taken are coming actually help the cause. They aren’t meant to be scary surprises – they are meant to make the player say “Oh shit, what now?” Alan Wake succeeds in spades.

Many words have been spent comparing Alan Wake to Heavy Rain and the comparisons are apt. Both are story-first, gameplay second. Both are console-exclusives that spent a considerable time in gestation in European development studios. While I enjoyed both a great deal, I believe that Alan Wake provides a better game experience.

When you play a game you make mental models to explain a number of highly strange things. For instance, let’s say I am playing Team Fortress 2. I need to explain that making a certain movement with my finger will cause my character to shoot a grenade. I need to explain what my target is by seeing it on screen and making a judgment that it is a “bad guy”. I need to explain that my “avatar” needs to move to the “control point” to win. I need to explain that a movement with my thumb translates to movement of my avatar. I need to explain that these things together will help me achieve my goal, which is standing on the control point.

The point I am trying to illustrate is that we have a lot of abstraction in something that we consider very familiar. Heavy Rain changes those abstractions. In order to open up a drawer, I have to make an odd swirly motion with my thumb. Why am I opening it? Uh, well, I’m not sure, but there is an icon on the screen telling me so. Where Heavy Rain fumbles is that the abstractions aren’t congruent with what we’ve expected. That is fine in of itself – every innovative game has, by definition, messed with our models of how things work. But when your entire presentation scraps the conventions, you have a lot of explaining to do – not literally, of course – but to the models we create internally. I have no problem moving a stick to walk my character to a car in Grand Theft Auto IV, pressing Triangle to carjack and then pressing R2 to accelerate away. It melds with our models and isn’t that strange. To do the same thing in Heavy Rain requires moving your character in a unique way, interacting with the door handle in a unique way, and driving automatically without input from the player. Our models are all frazzled!

Alan Wake, however, sprinkles its innovations amongst things that confirm our mental models. To say “it controls like an action game” is to say that it conforms to our models of the mechanics and dynamics of an action game. But does it really play as an action game? Not really. I’ll leave it to the reader to list all of the ways action games are vastly different than Alan Wake.

Let me thwart the straw man response that would assume that I am saying that breaking mental models is bad. Indeed, it is the only thing that provides us any growth. But look back at Alone in the Dark (the old one) for example. Games before that generally looked at player characters from the side or from above or from a subjective viewpoint. This game changed the mental model by making the camera a third-person observer. But we can answer the question ‘why’. The designers did this because it could create generally creepy moments. The payoff for breaking this model was a new presentation of emotion (fear) that helped further the game’s themes. There are numerous examples of changes that are just for the sake of change that do not further the games themes and these are less compelling and thus harder sells.

So here are two games that choose to eschew the common gameplay-then-story development process. Both are essentially “on rails”. Both are excellent games. But one breaks down nearly all of the common mental models for players. The other keeps you on edge by mixing the comfortable with the new. The new here is integrated with a way that dovetails with the game’s themes. Neither is essentially “right”, but I think this explanation is, for me, why one was more enjoyable than the other. I’m interested in hearing others’ opinions.