[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[Adam Wiggins]

[coder at ibm.net:]
> >[Ola Fosheim Gr=B0stad:]
> >> Andrew Glassner has written an article on what he feels is wrong with
> >> the current state of affairs in computer games.
> 
> Which I just posted...
> 
> >A very well-written article. 
> 
> Articulate certainly.  I question much of his logic.

I don't question his logic.  I question his motivations and assumptions.
The conclusions he arrives at make sense given where he starts from - I
just don't agree with where he starts from.

> >Secondly, I tend to think that it relates almost not at all to muds...
> 
> I found a lot of relevance.  As we are so opposite in many of our other
> MUD PoV's, I'm very interested in your comments on my cursory notes.

Just looked back at your repost of the article - I didn't realize you
had put in comments.  Here goes.

>On 06/11/97 at 09:20 PM, Ola Fosheim Gr=B0stad <olag at ifi.uio.no> said:
>>Andrew Glassner has written an article on what he feels is wrong with th=
>e
>>current state of affairs in computer games.  He is among other things
>>arguing against certain personality stats as well as magic. What do you
>>think? (For the record, Glassner is a famous computer graphics
>>researcher, the man behind the Graphic Gems series among other things)
>
>>http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/graphics/glassner/work/talks/=
>games.htm
>
>Which reads as below.  I've inserted brief comments surrounded by double
>square brackets]]:

Actually they aren't very square at all, and look more like this: <<>>

> The most recent trend is what I call story games. These are
> games that attempt to create some kind of narrative thread in
> which the player is involved. There's a lot of variety in this
> category. Because it's the kind of game I worked on, the rest of
> this essay will be devoted to this sort of game. In today's
> marketplace, most story games are actually puzzle games with
> a running story to unify or motivate the puzzles.
>
><<I'll note without comment that he ignored the MUD/MUSH/RP/etc end of
>interactive multi-player interactive etc games>>

Not surprising.  With as much press as both pen and paper RPGs and
online RPGs have gotten in the past twenty years, most people are still
ignorant of how they play.

> So why do I (and, I believe, many others) play them? Novelty.
> There is something exciting about the potential of today's
> games, enfeebled as they are. But novelty is transient. I have
> already begun to bore of most genres of computer games, and I
> predict that as time goes one, other players will come to share
> my apathy. Sales and interest will drop as novelty wears off if
> we don't create something enduring to take its place. That's
> why it's important to try to figure out how to build better
> games now.
>
><<I strongly agree, and for the same reasons.  I have an annual budget of
>near zero for games, yet my annual software budget is many $hundred.  The
>last game I actually went out and bought was a second hand copy of SimCit=
>y
>over two years ago.  That was the first game I'd bought in almost 5 years=
>.=20
>Of course this places me outside of the game manufacturer's target
>market/demographics -- but I find it more interesting that I'm being
>joined.  I must wonder (hope?) if that motion will become general.>>

Well the problem as I see it is that the technology for sparkle (graphics,
sound, FMV, other misc crap) has improved to incredible levels, but the
games themselves haven't expanded similarly.  If anything, they've diminished.

> The basic fallacy behind this myth is that it elevates
> interactivity to a special status above other game elements. In
> fact, interactivity is simply a quality or attribute of a game (or
> even moments in the game) like the abstract qualities of genre
> and mood or the concrete qualities of color and sound.
>
><<The point he is missing is that interactivity gives the player the
>illusion of ability to control his character/play sequence down to a
>(very) fine level.  Games which play pre-recorded movies/animations, only
>allowing limited interactivity between sequences, said activity then
>selecting the next sequence, ruin this illusion.  The player is now very
>aware that he is riding along on a pre-guided tour, and that it it up to
>him to be like a monkey and jump through the right hoops at the right
>times to see the whole dong and pony show.  Thus the insult to
>intelligence he mentioned previously.  Single-path-solution adventure
>games are another annoying version of this rule (cf above mention of the
>corrdor of doors above)>>

Right.  As a designer I would tend to agree with what he says above, but
as a player I know this to be untrue.  Getting to make a 'fake' choice
still reminds you that you're participating in the game and makes you
feel like you're more in control of the action.  Obviously too many of
these will start to make the player think that their choices don't matter,
but in my experience allowing the player to choose something just for the
sake of having the choice *is* a good thing.  Ie, the king of FroobleLand
says, "Oh great hero, won't you save my daughter from the dragon? (y/n)".
Naturally you have to pick 'yes' sooner or later in order to be able to
continue in the game; this is just part of the game's story.  But the
fact that you can answer no and go do other things for a while if you like,
and then come back to undertake the quest, keeps the player feeling like
they are at least directing the order and pacing of the action, rather than
just being swept along.

> Let me state baldly that game quality is not correlated to
> interaction quantity.

I believe it is correlated, but not so directly that a 100% interactive
game means that it will be 100% fun.

> This may sound obvious, but there are endless examples of
> games available today, some of which are highly regarded,
> which are loaded with pointless interactive moments.
> Working an ATM machine is certainly an interactive
> experience, but it is neither fun enough nor interesting
> enough to deserve to be called participatory, and does not
> belong in a game.
>
><<Echoes of the "eat food" debate for MUDs>>

Yes, and my response to this is the same as the response for the eat food
stuff.  If something is fun or interesting, the player should be able to
do it, and interact with it fully.  If it's not fun, it shouldn't be there
at all.  So I suppose I do agree with Glassner on this point after all,
although I think we might disagree on specific cases as we seem to have
some pretty different ideas of what, exactly, is fun.

> time and needs. Unfortunately, many games require you to go
> through whole sequences of actions that are unnecessary.
> Sometimes you need to do them more than once, which is
> particularly infuriating. For example, many games require
> you to move back and forth between two locations several
> times. To do this, you must plod step-by-step through all the
> intervening locations, even though you've been to each one
> before and have no reason to re-visit them. You accomplish
> your task, and then repeat the dreary process to return. This is
> interactive all right, but horrible. Neither fun nor interesting,
> it doesn't come close to being participatory.
>
> However, this sort of thing persists. One reason is because
> games sell better if they promise a certain number of hours of
> play; it helps the player feel she is making a reasonable
> financial investment since there's going to be a payback in a
> lot of fun. But there's the rub: you don't get back fun, you get
> back tedium. Walking through those same rooms and
> corridors time after time doesn't make me feel like I'm really
> in the environment; rather, it makes me angry that my time is
> being wasted and thereby removes me from the game's world.
>
><<This would seem to ignore the value of determining of the two locations
>at the ends of that travel path are in fact the ones required for the
>process or not>>
>
> Sure, we can't teleport in the real world, but we would if we
> could. In the computer, we can, so we should.

I think he's ignoring a broader principle, one which I struck upon above.
If the journey has something of value to it, it's worthwhile.  If it
is only trodding back over the same ground you covered before and doesn't
have anything new in it, it's probably not going to add anything to the
game.  On my favorite muds, the towns are usually far apart and trip between
them is a fairly serious endevour.  Is this not 'fun'?  Of course it is.
The trip is long and filled with perils.  I believe that the Odyessy
would have been a weaker piece of literature had it been a single line
reading, "Odysseus went home."
Thus, the whole point is, 'Don't require the player to do things which aren't
fun.'  Whether these things take place in the same geographical locations
or not is irrelevant.
A side note is that I consider the feeling of distance which is generated
by requiring such long trips to be a Good Thing.  In worlds where everyone
can get anywhere in one command, the whole thing feels much smaller, much
more like a simulation.  Global communications have the same effect, which
is why I'm so opposed to them.

> I played a game recently that applied this principle nicely.
> One of the game's features is that you can select two objects
> that you are carrying with you and order the computer to
> "combine" them. If this makes any sense, it does so. For
> example, combining a light bulb with a lamp means that the
> bulb is screwed into the lamp's socket. Sometimes very
> complex things get assembled for you in response to this
> single command. That's good design.

Erm...is this not a standard interface in adventure games?

> A game should offer the fastest and easiest possible way to do
> everything unless there is some entertaining or informative
> reason to prevent it.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that people don't want to spend time
doing things that aren't fun.

><<Which says a lot about the current state of MUD parsers and much of what
>has been debated here in regard to what could be done>>

nod, I think the real question here becomes what is worthwhile or not.
I think that requring spellcaster to assemble rare components and chant
mantras over sacred altars in the full moon to cast powerful spells is
a lot of fun and full of mood and style.  Others find this to be needless
busywork, and just want to type "cast 'nuclear blast'" and get on with it.

> Now consider a computer game where a player finds a scuba
> outfit lying by the side of a mysterious but inviting lake. The
> player has heard stories of a sunken ship and a secret it
> carries; clearly the right thing to do here is to put on the suit
> and head into the lake. Checking the air gauge (which reads
> full), the player dons the gear and enters the water. A few
> minutes later, far from shore and deep in the water, the air
> runs out. As the player fights her way back to safety, she
> realizes that the dial was defective and the air tanks were
> almost empty when she found them. Had she known this, she
> never would have gone in.
>
><<Was there a value in the fact that the guage was faulty. was there a use
>for this datum, or was it merely deceptive to the player?>>

Yeah, a limited example.  I think a more direct and obvious example of
the same principle is walking down a corridor and suddenly falling into
a spike trap pit to your character's instant demise.  If the only way to
avoid this is to die once, then reload your game rememebering where the
pit was and walking around it, it's basically busywork to 'slow down' the
player's progress in the game.  The above is the same sort of thing: I
would imagine that the idea would be that the player would have to reload
her game and take the scubba gear (which she now knows is faulty) to
a repair shop before using it.  This is, indeed, a bad thing.  I think that
it would be just fine, however, if it were *not* fatal, but still deceptive -
you dive into the water, immediately start choking for air, and come back
to the surface choking and sputtering with the realization that the equipment
needs some tune-up work on it.  I don't find this specific example to be
a really well-designed puzzle, but I would find it acceptable as a player.

> When this happens in a book or film, it can be very exciting.
> In the best examples, we identify with the character and feel
> her panic, and we feel angry with the villain who placed our
> hero in this predicament. We learn about the hero by how she
> responds to the problem, and are carried along by our fear and
> our trust. We trust the writer of the story to make it satisfying
> for us, and worth our time and concern.

I don't think it's all that different from a movie.  If the main character
got some scubba gear that was defective and died because of it, most people
would think the movie sucked.  Generally the hero/heroine gets these sorts
of things all the time, but is able to squeeze their way out of trouble.
A computer game should be the same.

> In today's story games, we do not have a given narrative. We
> are constantly reminded that we are the hero of the story, and
> the things we do determine what will happen. It is not our
> hero who has been tricked, it's us. It's not the evil villain who
> left the broken scuba gear lying around, it's the game designer.
> We are in constant conversation with the game creator, more
> than we are with almost any author or screenwriter. Bad
> things done to the hero in fact happen to us, personally.

Total disagreement here.  The bad thing is happening to *my character*, which
I do have a closer attachment to than a character in a film, but not the
the extent that Glassner seems to think.

> Sometimes you hear this defended with an appeal to
> verisimilitude, claiming that we run across deceptive
> information all the time in the real world. True enough. And
> in the real world, we also get false promises from politicians
> and lies from drug companies. The appeal is weak - just
> because deception appears in the real world doesn't mean it
> belongs in our entertainments.

No, but deception is very interesting and makes for good stories.  To
take a very prominent example, check out all the people who play Vampire
the Masquerade and all the WoD mushes.

> Mistakes aren't always bad. Part of the fun of learning about a
> new environment is learning a new set of rules. And part of
> that experience means making mistakes by misinterpreting
> instructions, or mistaking a new object for a familiar old one
> and using it incorrectly. That's learning.
>
> But a deliberate deception is an artificial roadblock, created
> solely to make life harder for the player. That's not fun, that's
> annoying.
>
><<Good point.>>

I don't think it's so much deception as it is instant death.  Deception is
okay as long as you don't go overboard (ie, Paul Reiser's character in
Aliens added immensley to that movie, but if everyone on the space marines
squad had been deceiving each other, it would have gotten a bit old).
If you have no chance to avoid an instant *end* to your game, than this is
bad, and in fact has little to do with deception.

> The game designer should not deliberately deceive the player
> unless it leads to insight.
>
><<Ie Player requirements should deliver value>>

The specific details and examples I can nitpick (as with most of this
essay), but this statement I can wholeheartedly agree with.

> Often the result is a crude series of choices - in effect,
> replicating the standard multiple-choice diagnostic
> personality inventories in the disguise of making game
> decisions (this is why the technique is so easily applied in
> branching narratives). Even children see right through the
> disguised choices. Rather than deciding what to do in a
> situation based on their own feelings of right and wrong,
> children make choices for the protagonist they are controlling
> because they want to "make him mean" or "see what happens
> if you make her really stupid." They game the game - that is,
> they attempt to influence the underlying mechanism of the
> game. In other words, they are not playing the game itself.
> This marks failure for a game designer. By analogy, when a
> filmgoer starts thinking about the special effects or makeup,
> the film director has failed.

Nice analogy, but I don't think it applies.  Is 'gaming the game' (I
like the term) a bad thing?  I don't think so at all.  Deciding that
you want a particularly brave character and answering the questionaire
in such a way as to reflect that, even if you're not particularly brave,
is a-okay by me, and in fact is part of what makes games fun.

This goes back to the whole seperation of character and player thing, though.
Since I believe very strongly in this concept, the above doesn't bother me,
and I see as a feature of the game.  Of course, this means I actually
prefer a character creation process by which you can simply choose how
you want your character to be, instead of the silly charade with the
questionaire.  On the other hand, that method worked fine for Ultima - but
I don't see why I'm required to answer the questions as *I* would answer
them, if I have a specific character in mind that I want to play.

> Adults see through these personality tests as easily as children,
> but because they are more aware of the fact that they are being
> labeled and pigeonholed they are more likely to resent it. And
> having paid for the game and invested valuable time, they are
> apt to be offended by this attempt to characterize the
> complexity of their personality by a trivial scoring system. In
> effect, the player is being told that subtlety of expression and
> depth of understanding are irrelevant. The player is clearly
> aware of the need to think about how the game will interpret
> her choices, which removes her from immersion in the game
> itself.
>
><<Sounds like an argument against RP...>>

Yup.  But it's obvious he's either not interested in, or has never
tried, any sort of RP game.  That's okay, but I think stating that
it makes for bad games is a very subjective standpoint.  That's like
me saying that linear adventure games are bad games.  I don't *like*
those kinds of games, but I can appreciate who would, and tell the
difference between a plain badly designed game, and a well-designed game
which I just don't enjoy.

> Don't trick players into providing a personality description.

Right.  Ask them outright what kind of character they what to play.

> Avoid large-scale randomness.

Don't have much to say about this.  The most fun I have ever had playing
a single-playing computer game are the roguelike derivitives, namely
Angband, which is based entirely on randomly generated dungeons, monster,
treasure, and equipment.  So I tend to disagree with the above statement,
but I'd like to restate it as:

Avoid lack of patterns.

The 'randomness' in Angband is very channeled.  It follows certain rules,
which emerge into patterns, which in turn form the meat of the game.
I think (hope?) that this is what Glassner meant by large-scale randomness:
things with no particular purpose or direction.  Whether a given feature
was generated by a few random() calls or by a human plunking down tiles
wherever they liked doesn't really matter.

> Suppose that you think you recognize the driver as the rude
> man you argued with in the coffeeshop earlier. You really
> want to confirm his identity, but that option's not available.
> The basic principle of the game has been violated: you can't
> do what you want. The only response is to either choose at
> random, or else game the game, meaning slipping out of the
> game's world and trying to figure out what the different
> courses of action will lead you to and picking the one that's
> most attractive (or least unattractive).
>
><<cf above comment on interactivity>>

This guy wants a holodeck.  Given the choice between *no* NPC interaction
whatsoever, and some limited interaction, I'll choose the second.  Also,
he himself has chided people for comparing game mechanisms to their
real-world counterparts; isn't he doing exactly that right here?  This
is like complaining about why, in an arcade game where you fly a space ship,
you can't go up or down on the Z axis, but instead only in the four cardinal
directions.  When you make a game you decide what things you're going
to include and what things you aren't.  It's not like you could go
down and see a new area that you never saw before if someone hacked the game
so that you had Z-axis movement.  The game has certain limits, and that's
it.  Naturally it's best if those limits are very clear to the player
and make some sort of sense (like the area just below your spaceship is solid
ground, and flying down would cause you to crash into it), so that they don't
sit there and wonder why they can't do certain things that it looks like they
should be able to do.

> This is a disaster for a story-based game; the player is ripped
> right out of the game's world and all the production values in
> the world won't bring her back in, at least not for a while.

I see it a little differently.  The four (or whatever) choices I'm given
at the bottom of the screen are the things that the character onscreen is
thinking of.  I simply get to choose which one he actually says.

> Avoid multiple-choice conversations.

His logic is sound, but once again the player in me has to disagree.
Both Monkey Island games would have been pale shadows of what they actually
were without the multi-choice conversations.

> Describe choices clearly.

Not only choices, but the game world as a whole.  No one wants to feel
like they are spending their time trying to figure out the game elements
on the simplest level.  This is like fooling around trying to figure out
how to move, how to invoke certain skills your player has, or what a
certain object is supposed to be.  Sometimes the fault lies simply with
the medium - the text of an object's description is unable to describe
it well, or the graphic which represents an object is too small to show
clearly what it is.  Other times it's simply because of obscure interface
methods or misleading responses to certain inputs.  Regardless, this
isn't a lot of fun.  The player wants to spend time understanding
the high-level elements - how the game world works and interacts.

> In one game I played recently you assemble some pieces in
> what you think is the right order, and then push a big button
> to submit your answer. Pushing the button initiates a
> sequence of visual and audio effects, simulating some big
> machine "examining" your answer. Eventually it might tell
> you that some of the clips are in the wrong order, and then
> you hear some audio encouraging you to keep trying. All of
> this takes about 15 seconds, but it feels like a half-hour. By
> the third or fourth time I submitted an answer I was resentful
> that I was forced to waste my time waiting for this now-boring
> effect to repeat. There was no way to hurry it up or skip over
> it. By the tenth time I went through the process I was ready to
> climb the walls.

Amen.

> Then the cut-scene takes over, and this illusion is utterly
> annihilated. My character starts acting in ways that I would
> never dream of. I cannot stop things from going wrong, I
> cannot control what goes on - I am irrelevant. The cut-scene
> plays at its own speed, hurtling the story forward and carrying
> me along with it. Virtually always these cut-scenes are the
> cinematically interesting ones, which means that they have
> lots of action. Character is revealed by action; what the hero
> does on the screen tells the viewer much of who that character
> is.
>
> But wait a second, that character is me!

Again, I take exception to all of this because of the basic premise.
The character is *not* you, Glassner.  It is a character which comes with
its own abilities, desires, and faults.  It is up to you to direct the
character most of the time, but it is not you.

> Well, only during "interactive mode", when I am in total
> control. My speed, my choices. Then I am abruptly jerked
> into "cut-scene mode", where I am a totally passive spectator
> as the action plays out at its own speed, and my character does
> things I would never do. When the cut-scene ends, I am
> thrown back into interactive mode, and suddenly I am left
> with the problem of cleaning up the new situation. A
> situation that is result of my actions, which I never made!
>
> And that's why I get offended. I'm told that I need to exercise
> my imagination and involve myself in the world and its
> characters, and then I am shown that I got it wrong. Even your
> own character acts in ways that disagree with your intentions,
> and this is the worst: every now and then control of "yourself"
> is ripped out of your hands, and you the player can only sit
> passively while the onscreen "you" acts incorrectly. This must
> be what it feels like to be schizophrenic.
>
> The game repeatedly and alternately requires you to be
> creative and inhabit your character, and then denies your
> creativity and yanks the character away from you. This is bad
> design.
>
> Never take over control of the player's character.

Again the logic is sound, but as a player I can't agree.  I *like*
cut scenes, when done right (again, all the Lucasarts game do them well).
Secondly, this is one again a limit of the technology.  Many things you
just *can't* do as part of the regular game.  Rather than leave them out
and make the game much hollower, I think it's worthwhile to limit the
players control for a brief while.  However, I *do* think that designers
should think carefully before deciding to do something like this.  It
should be important, quick to execute, and not leave the player saying,
"Hey wait!  I want to run after that guy!"  And of course, the cut scene
should be necessary.  If you don't have to take away the player's control
in order for it to work, then don't.

><<This would seem to argue against the RP-common point of automating
>certain player reactions, such as becoming angry and attacking when
>another character spills his beer on you.>>

This is a slightly different area, but related to the character/player
seperation issue.  I think of myself as a little voice whispering in the
character's ear, rather than the character's brain, so this doesn't bother me.

> To summarize, the fundamental problems of "interactive
> fiction" are twofold. First, the author must do much more
> work to create a piece of comparable quality to a
> non-interactive work. Second, when a listener/viewer/player
> controls characters in a story, she can interfere with the
> character's personality, which fatally injures the development
> of the character and leads to a psychotic personality and
> uninteresting story.

I take exception to the last three words of that paragraph.
What is it that makes a psychotic personality inherently
uninteresting, pray tell?

> At the heart of every good design will be respect for the
> player. And that means that the player's time will never be
> wasted, and the game will never insult or deny her
> individuality, intelligence, or creativity. The player will
> always be engaged in fun or interesting events, whether she is
> receiving them passively or interacting with them.
>
><<Aside: His persistant use of the female pronoun for the neuter is
>amazingly annoying>>

Well, it's become popular recently as an attempted backlash to the
use of the male pronoun for said same purpose.  Of course, it was
plenty annoying before, and throwing in a hearty dose of PCness
only makes it worse.  Alas for english not having some less
ackward neutral pronouns other than "one" and "them".  I generally
get fed up with the way using both of these things sound and revent
to a pronoun of random gender.  This can ocasionally be handy has
having two different genders in a convulted sentence can make which
pronoun applies to which actor much clearer.

(rest snipped)

Anyhow, after re-reading it in order to respond, I still think most of
his logic is pretty sound, just that his own experience with games and
other game-players is pretty limited.