[MUD-Dev] New game: PerplexCity

[ceo]

As mentioned previously, I've been working on PC since the start of
this year. It's an Alternate Reality Game
(http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050509/hon_pfv.htm for a brief
intro to ARG's) i.e. online, but played in real-life, rather than
encapsulated within a single client-application that makes it clear
you are in a "game".

This has become a rather long post. I just wanted to point out some
interesting personal observations I've made along the way.

---- A brief explanation of the game:

PerplexCity is in a different world similar to our own but slightly
more technologically advanced. Someone stole the Cube, an object of
great value, and brought it to our world. The people of PerplexCity
desperately want it back, and hired us to create a game to engage
people on Earth to help find the Cube. Whoever finds it gets a
$200,000 reward (cash, I believe). We don't know where it is, but
we'll know it when we see it ;).

Since no-one quite knows who stole it, the people of PerplexCity
have been working with us to provide gateways into their world so
that players on Earth can do their own detective work and try and
solve this mystery (which so far no-one in PerplexCity has been able
to do - but maybe it just needs a fresh perspective). We are getting
as many as possible of the websites from their world online on the
internet here, one by one. As a culture, they are obssesed with
puzzles and intelligence - their Academy has produced a series of
self-contained puzzles which we are printing and selling at retail
in shops around the world. $5 gets you 6 random puzzles. These
puzzles also contain extra information in that they are designed by
and set in the world of PerplexCity, so help flesh out more about
that world.

---- Interesting things about perplexcity:

We launched a week or so ago, and have tens of thousands of players
involved already (although the cards are currently only available in
9 stores around the world, so that so far only a small percentage
have been able to buy any).

---- 2 elder games:

The primary game for PerplexCity is a mass-market cheap retail
product: high-quality puzzles. These range smoothly in difficulty
from simple optical illusions and tower-of-hanoi scenarios up to one
which poses the Riemann hypothesis.

It's well known that repeatedly sitting IQ tests increases your
(measured) IQ, and that solving puzzles regularly increases your
puzzle-solving ability. PerplexCity has been a long time in
development, and it's been obvious that people's puzzle-solving
ability has increased the longer they've been involved. There is
also a huge collaborative online community dedicated to this game,
who have collectively been able to solve puzzles as hard as a
cryptic riddle written in Egyptian hieroglyphs (apparently if you
randomly pick sufficiently many people sooner or later you find you
have an Egyptologist among them :)).

So...puzzle solving will eventually become easy, or all the known
ones will be solved. This leads into joining the online community
playing the game (although many people will find the online
community from day one), and joining the *online* game, that plays
out through websites, downloadable in-game games, puzzles,
interaction with people from PerplexCity, live events (partially
online, partially offline, etc) (all these have happened already, to
some extent). This is where the characters from PerplexCity come
alive, and can interact with the players from Earth. Solving the
retail puzzles isn't essential to taking part in this, but without
working through them, you'll lack the context and background
knowledge of who all the major people are in PerplexCity, and their
histories and relationships.

And, eventually, for those who become exceptionally good at this
more free-form interactive game, there's always that cash prize to
find. This is a treasure-hunt, or a detective-story problem,
depending upon how you look at it. Personally, I have no idea where
it is, but AFAICT there's no such thing as the perfect crime, and
I'm sure someone will eventually find sufficient incriminating
evidence as to work out where the Cube is now.

It's worth noting that each level of the game trains people to be
better at the higher levels, as well as giving them the background
information they will need. It's also worth noting that the basic
game is very rigid, with all the puzzles being self-contained, but
as you move into the elder games, everything becomes increasingly
unconstrained until the final puzzle - where the Cube is now - which
has no guidelines, no limits, no rails to force you down one line of
enquiry. There is no game-client pushing you in certain directions
(that would imply we knew where the Cube was, for a start ;)).

---- puzzles != games:

Although it's not my job to invent puzzles, I've helped with many of
them, and consulted on implementations and solvability, as well as
playtesting for difficulty and enjoyability. I've provided ideas for
things which have then been turned into puzzles, and been involved
heavily along the way.

All of this has very firmly ingrained in me the differences between
a game and a puzzle, and now I cannot see the latter term used
without having a very clear idea what it meant. This time last year,
I had that strong an association for "computer game" but the term
"puzzle" I had only vague concepts of.

Here are some personal observations that I think particularly
interesting to anyone putting puzzle-esque elements into a game or
vice versa:

  - Puzzles have one, single, solution, and only the solution
  matters, whereas with games it's the playing that matters, and
  they may have arbitrarily many outcomes

  - As soon as you know how to solve a puzzle, you know how to solve
  all puzzles that are similar with 100% accuracy, and usually many
  orders of magnitude faster than anyone could hope to solve them
  first-time. With a a game, being good at one helps with others,
  but you still have a learning curve, and have to adapt to each
  game. You also still have to play through the game, there is no
  super-fast shortcut. Typically, a puzzle that takes 5 minutes to
  solve first time takes 5-30 seconds to solve thereafter (or less,
  if the solution is simply some fact); a game that takes 5 minutes
  to complete the first time typically cannot be completed in less
  than 3-4 minutes anyway.

  - ...good games don't have universal solutions: they have
  strategies and tactics, which is another way of saying "A toolkit
  of partial solutions, which have to be intelligently deployed
  during play, and whose selection *must be constantly re-evaluated*
  based on feedback from how well the thus-far-played partial
  solutions are faring".

  - Both can be interactive, both with other players and with
  mechanical rules that are hidden from view (for instance, a
  rubik's cube). This is where most of teh blurring between the two
  takes place: at what point does the interactive puzzle become a
  game, and vice versa?

  - ...it's all about Determinisim. If the other players, and the
  unknowns, are deterministic, you have a puzzle. If they are
  non-deterministic, you have a game. Tic-tac-toe against a very
  inexperienced player is non-deterministic, a game. Against a
  standard player, it's almost entirely deterministic, and becomes a
  puzzle which you either solve every single time or end up in a
  draw every single time.

Similarly, playing games such as Connect-4 against an optimal
comptuer opponent, who never makes a mistake, ceases to be a game:
it has become a puzzle.

---- the content-creation problem:

All MMOG designers know the fundamental problems of content
creation: if crafted by staff, there are several orders of magnitude
more players that staff, and they work through the content
co-operatively, whereas it has to be created by individuals. In
summary, it is not possible to create content anywhere near as fast
as players devour it - even if you employed as many content-creators
as you had players.

(though full of sweeping generalizations, and ignoring known
exceptions, I hope that's a fair brief summary of the problem!)

Injecting story into content that has to be churned out at a
ferocious rate is very hard, simply in terms of the time
penalty. The de facto standard approach is to have no story at all,
or very little, or story-elements that are shallow and/or trivial
(so that no human intervention is required to link them together in
believable ways). Trying to automate this, or to at least convert it
into efficient processes, is an area of cutting-edge research, with
little or no signs of success for now.

ARG's flip this on it's head: instead of having content that the
developer tries to inject with story, or link to the story, ARG's
have story that the writer tries to convert into content, or link to
content.

Let me be very clear: in a traditional MMORPG, the base gameplay
involves controlling an in-game avatar and developing them and
shaping their destiny, whilst directly impacting the game-world at a
VERY fine grain (you can physically molest, obstruct, destroy, etc
any person or thing in the world). ARG's *do not allow* the players
to control something with that vast amount of power: players have
full interaction with game-characters, but it's indirect. You can
never physically turn up at the offices of the characters and start
beating them up (whereas in an MMORPG you can easily guide your
avatar over to an NPC and resort to the most basic and - ultimately
- powerful of ways to achieve what you want). In the real world,
most of our interaction with other people - and especially with
organizations - is just like the ARG: indirect, filtered, etc. It is
often impossible to obtain someone's phone number, or to visit in
person the helpdesk operator who's refusing to believe your
broadband connection has a fault. In the real world, we're a lot
less powerful than we tend to realise; in the MMORPG, we control a
lump of muscle (and magic) that has no fear, no comprehension of
"consequences", and which is eager to go out and flex its muscles
(figuratively speaking: the MMORPG gives the player a conceptual
vehicle with a few core abilities. Asking them not to make use of
that would be like giving someone a car and asking them never to
drive anywhere).

Now, for some examples...

If an ARG has a character who falls in love with someone
unattainable, it takes only a few hours for a skilled web designer
to create 5 websites to tell the story: a corporate site for the
target's employer, a personal site with forum postings from friends
of both target and hero(ine), and private IM's between said friends,
and between target, hero, and their friends, a personal anonymous
diary (use any weblog) charting the hero's innermost thoughts, a
town website sketching out the area where the story takes place,
with a few photos the odd monument or two, and some potted histories
of key people in the town (Mayor, Judge, etc), and finally a
friend/lawyer/coroner's site with the post-mortem explaining what
happened in the end (depending upon how you want it to turn out!).

Hey, why not just have all 3 of those last: it's not hard to create
each of them, with only a smattering of content. Now you have 3
outcomes for the story, all prepared. You also have the opportunity
to do something special in terms of content consumption (more on
that later).

All you need do now is password protect all the relevant parts with
passowrds etc that are pointed to by events, people, postings,
favourite colours, pet names etc which are *already featured in your
made-up smatterings of content*. Suddenly, you have hours of
content.

Unleash 50 players on that, and you have ... days of content. How?
Because they will collaborate, and by leaving so many gaps, so many
unknowns, etc you leave huge holes for them to invent their own
explanations, and create story arcs they try to follow. They will
happily amuse themselves on these arcs, using the rest of the web to
try and confirm or deny their suppositions. You don't need to handle
these cases - the web does that for you, with it's billions of pages
covering everything under the sun. In most cases, like examining the
Bible Code, you can find a website (or set of them) sooner or later
that proves or disproves any single theory you could think of ;).

Quick note on the 3 endings: you can of course partially release all
three. Now you have set up a new mystery: what really happened? The
players will spend weeks debating this, researching it, coming to
their own conclusions, formulating and disproving theories, etc -
even if you haven't even made up your own mind.

That's a cynical example, and I'm not saying that's what we've
actually done, but as a general feature of the way people interact
with things it helps us: we are only a small team, and with MMORPG
levels of content-creation problems we'd have thousands of players
screaming at us over our woeful inability to get content from
PerplexCity published at a satisfactory rate.

Indeed, one problem peculiar to entirely fictional ARG's is that
with the huge variety of player-invented explanations you often spot
story-arcs that are more interesting than those you came up with,
and there is an established history of ARG writers throwing away
plot and writing new plot just-in-time (hours or minutes before it
has to go live) just to take advantage of better ideas and
characterizations that the players have come up with.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the freeform debate of the
game-characters by the players puts most of the
character-development in the hands of the players: they read orders
of magnitude more about the characters and theoretical/proposed
backgrounds and explanations of their behaviour than you will ever
publish. Many characters have become more real throgh the analysis
and imaginations of the players than they ever did from the
author. The best authors leverage this well.

---- $2000 marketing budget

At the GDC this year in Gordon's roundtable on Viral Marketing I
pointed out we'd got circa 10,000 players on a marketing budget of
$500 or so. Back then we'd not even gone public, although we'd had 6
feature articles in international publications (New York Times,
Sunday Times, Liberation, etc). As far as I know that's now more
like a couple of thousand dollars, but with 4 times as many
players. Our company is now officially recognised within the game
(so journalists are able to find us and interview us), which no
doubt helps, but I reckon it's scaling pretty well so far...

Adam M
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