Valve’s Team Fortress 2 team has started an official design blog, opening with a post on the design challenge they’re facing for their next content release pack.

TF2 is a fantastic class-based multiplayer game with great polish and attention to design.   They’ve slowly been releasing content packs focused on upgrades for a specific in-game class, with existing releases for the Medic and Pyro classes which made some great changes without upsetting the game’s balance too much.  What I love about this blog update is that it’s a great example of how to approach a real design problem and how to ask the right questions.

We do design collaboratively at Valve, and one of the side effects of it is that we really need to be able to evaluate design ideas as objectively as possible. Otherwise design meetings would devolve into subjective arguing. We’ve found that the best method of working objectively is to have clear goals up front. Once we’ve got clear goals, we can throw a bunch of ideas up on the board and measure how well each idea achieves those goals.

This is the kind of thought process that I hope to be able to pass along to others when I introduce them to game design.  It’s important to see that the right answer to a design problem isn’t just the one that sounds the coolest in your imagination.  It should solve a specific design problem and fit within constraints that keep the rest of the game from being broken.  That critical thinking process shouldn’t kill the creativity, but should provide constraints which push your creative thinking into new avenues and greater heights until you reach a truly great (and fun!) solution.

For anyone who’s played TF2 enough to understand the game’s classes, the entire blog post is very worth a read.

This is not one of my usual topics to blog about here, but it’s related in a number of ways (to design, authorship, and education) so I’m using this space to share my opinions and ask some questions.

The Canadian government has just tabled a new bill which would revise the Copyright Act. I’m actually reading the darn thing - the full legalese, not just the Coles Notes version they’ve provided online. You can read the critical summary at Michael Geist’s blog and his description of why this is essentially a betrayal to Canadians. More of my thoughts and questions after the break.

First, I’ll just add that it’s fascinating trying to work through how one bill modifies an existing act. It’s like a giant legal version of a diff, for those with coding background. For that matter, I found myself wishing that they would’ve simply published a page with the existing Copyright Act on one side and the modified version alongside it, the same way code diff tools work. Anyway, onto the actual content.

It adds some nice sounding provisions for Canadian consumers (timeshifting, personal copying) but overshadowing all of this is the fact that it makes it flatly illegal to circumvent any kind of digital copy protection. This means that they can say you have the right to copy a CD onto your iPod, but if that CD has copy protection then it’s illegal for you to bypass that lock required to actually make a copy.

There are even weirder provisions for educators. The bill tries to allow educators who are including (under already legal fair use) pieces of copyrighted works in their lessons, the right to broadcast or share those lessons - as would be required if you were, say, teaching via a webcast or some other videoconferencing method. But it requires these “lessons” as defined to be destroyed within 30 days of the end of the class. No exception given - suddenly teachers aren’t allowed to archive their own lessons if there is any fair-use copied work included. Not only that, but teachers must include some “reasonable” measures to prevent students from archiving or copying these lessons themselves - oh great, now any telecast classroom has to include DRM measures. This is a technological headache at best, nightmare at worst.

Libraries can sign out digital copies of works - but only if they are loaded down with DRM and set to self-destruct in five business days. Yes, now your DRM needs to know when your stat holidays take place.

I still have some open questions after reading through the bill. What’s the deal with the new bits making it an offense to transfer ownership of a “tangible copy” of a work until the copyright holder has transferred ownership once? I’m not even sure how this would happen short of someone (physically) stealing someone’s work and then selling it, but that should already be pretty obviously a crime. And why only a “tangible copy”, which seems to exclude digital downloads?

There are a lot of good changes in here - a lot of stuff in here made me happy. Too bad it’s largely undermined by the DRM / Technical Measures section which will put an effective stranglehold on whatever other fair use and private copying rights are given.

Here’s my notes dump I typed while reading through the Bill. Halfway through I start giving a quick summary of each point in the Technical Measures section.

1.(1) What is the effect of redefining "moral rights" here?

2. Are there instances of ownership of "tangible objects" being transferred
which are legal prior to this amendment but illegal afterwards?  were people
allowed to sell copies of things they didn't produce before? how does this
affect digital download purchases?

4. Old photography clause (section 10) is repealed. Is it replaced with a new
one?  Or is this removing an exception that made photos behave differently re:
corporate copyright vs original photographer copyright?

7.(1) only notable addition I can see here is more "tangible object" stuff.
why aren't they just using the "fixation" terminology? are they excluding
ownership of digital fixations?

8. Why are they duplicating the original moral rights clauses here, but only
for sound?  was there something unclear about the moral rights of sound works
earlier?  does this change anything?

17. Ok, so here is where we're "allowed" to privately copy video, print, books,
music ... unless it has DRM locks.  Also, existing allowances for recording
audio onto audio media is untouched - so copying CDs and tapes is exempt from
this clause entirely (anything already being hit by the copying tariff).

Why are internet-only broadcasts excluded from the timeshifting clause?
Why are "network personal video recorder services" excluded?  Unsure on
terminology here - is this excluding timeshifting of pay-per-view or some
specific form of digital TV?

18. Oh, man. So any "lesson" that includes any bit of copyrighted work must
be *FREAKING DESTROYED* within a month of the course ending?  So teachers
aren't allowed to archive their lessons?  This is ridiculous.  I don't even
see any exception for the teacher's own private use.

This gives otherwise fair-use copying a viral effect of forcing you to destroy
and lock down the entire "lesson".  The emphasis here seems to be on livecast
classrooms, but what about sharing notes and slides that include some fair-use
copied images?

in new 30.04 - sounds like teachers aren't allowed to print off resources from
online encyclopedias that are subscriber-only. if the encyclopedia company
themselves give educators permission, then this doesn't matter - but do they
generally do so? this is iffy.  and again, DRM trumps all in this law.

19. yay, better wording for archiving old media. something good in here

20. the '5 days only' digital clause for libraries. why the heck do they get
to decide how long a library can sign something out? why '5 business days'?
how the heck is DRM going to manage knowing a library's business days?  lame

21. Ok, ISPs and webhosts aren't infringing simply by transmitting and storing
data for others.  This is good.
... unless the ISP/host is told by a court that their client is infringing.
this is ... well, we'll see if the ISP giants like this or not.

22. It's not illegal to copy a photograph that someone made specifically for
you. Okay.

29. Why are sections 36 and 37 being repealed? was it redundant?

30.(1) Here's the infamous $500 fine - but that fine was already in place.
This is losing me a bit - falling back on the 'coles notes' version.
looks like they're actually *reducing* the fines that someone could already
sue for - unless you broke DRM, in which case, screw you, full old-school fines.

Thank goodness, they excluded schools from being sued for statutory damages.

31. The new "Technical Measures" section. This is going to hurt.
Let's sum it up as we go:

41.1(1)
(a) No breaking TMs.
(b) No offering services that break TMs, or that are "not
commercially significant" for anything other than breaking TMs.  Don't market
that you're breaking TMs.
(c) No selling or distributing anything which primarily breaks TMs, or are not
"commercially significant" for anything other than breaking TMs. Also don't
market that your product breaks TMs.

(2) The copyright owner can sue for infringement of copyright when someone
violates a TM on their work.

(3) But they can't elect for statutory damages if someone broke a TM for
private use only.

(4) But those who make TM-breaking services or tools available can have the
pants sued off of them, including statutory damages galore.

41.11
(1) Law enforcement is allowed to break TMs whenever they need to.
(2) Law enforcement is allowed to provide TM-breaking services for the purposes
of busting any suckers who use them.  (Seriously, if I find out our police are
wasting their time on TM-breaking sting operations, I will cry for our nation.)
(3) You're allowed to sell TM-breaking stuff to law enforcement.

41.12
(1) You're allowed to break TM on software if you're solely doing so to make
that program "interoperable" with other software.  Unsure what this does and
doesn't apply to.
(2) You're allowed to offer TM-breaking services for the purposes of making
software interoperable.  The clarification on the gov't notes leads me to
believe these are their reverse engineering clauses.
(3) - (7) You can share this knowledge, etc, but all of it falls apart if you
violate copyright or break any other law.

41.13
(1) - (3) You can break TMs for encryption research, but you have to obtain
the work legally and you have to notify the owner of the copyright that you're
trying to hack their DRM.

41.14
!!!! Yes, some signs of smarts!  You're allowed to break TMs to find out if
they invade your privacy, and if so to stop them from doing so.  Applies unless
the company notified you of the invasion and gives you an opt-out.
Downside: only applies to collection and transmission of personal information.
Doesn't apply to, say, rootkit DRM or other tech nightmares.
Also, you're allowed to distribute tools or offer services to clean up spyware
TMs.

41.15
You're allowed to break TMs for the purpose of assessing the vulnerability of a
computer, system or network or to correct security flaws.  Screw you, rootkit
DRM!  This is good to see.  In fact this is better than the "security testing"
summary on the govt site - you can both test AND secure your system.

You're allowed to offer TM-breaking products and services for said purpose.

You're not allowed to violate copyright while securing your system.  (However,
if you want to make personal copies or other fair-use copies of something
that's 'protected' by a rootkit or other security-hole TM, that isn't
infringement, so I guess it's okay?  Weirdly, this might mean you can legally
get past TMs for fair-use if the TMs go too far and screw up your system.)

41.16

You can break TMs for the purpose of better accessing it with perceptual
disabilities.  You can make tools / services available to do so.

41.17

You can break TMs to broadcast ephemeral reproductions (eg. radio) of a work,
unless the copyright holder makes the work available to you without a TM.

41.18 - you may get off easy if you were clueless. maybe.

41.19

Educators/libraries who convince a judge they were clueless get off scot-free.
But only if they convince the judge, after the headache and expense of a
lawsuit.

What the heck, people - why does this section not simply say that they are
allowed to break TMs for fair-use copying relating to education?  We just gave
exceptions to police, the disabled, security, reverse-engineering.  Why can't
we do the same for fair-use copying in general?  I'll write the friggin'
section myself, it wouldn't be hard.

41.2

The Governor in Council may make further exceptions to the above after
considering a bunch of stuff, such as the obvious problems I've already stated.
This is specificially even mentioning the restrictions TMs place on educators,
libraries, news reporting, criticism, etc.

So there's an open door for sanity to come in at a later time - if someone gets
around to it.  This really doesn't cut it.  This is like saying, "Okay, we see
a huge load of problems, but we'd rather offload those concerns to someone
else while we make the U.S. and our well-funded recording and movie industry
lobbyists happy."

41.21

No stripping of DRM data.  Which I guess is not quite the same as breaking a
TM or copy protection scheme.

Okay, that's it for the TM section.

Skimming past the "notice-and-notice" ISP stuff. As far as I understand it, I
have no real problem with this.  Better than "notice-and-takedown", anyway.

(back to C-61 numbers, for those wondering how I jumped from 41 to 31)
32. Libraries and educators are exempted from being criminally guilty for
breaking TMs as described in the new section 41.1.  So educators can break TMs
too, then, but no one's allowed to make tools and services available to them?
What the heck, people.

This was such a great response to the question of whether kids and video games should mix that it needs to be passed along.

 Are video games ever good for kids? Of course they are. They can be good for adults, and even seniors, too.

Can they be bad? Of course they can. It depends on the games and on the people who are playing them.

Actually, the same can be said for any kind of game. Can chess be bad? It can be, if it becomes an obsession, if the chess players pursue chess to the exclusion of everything else social, physical, and intellectual.

Go read the rest of Bernie DeKoven’s response for the full dose of ludic enlightenment.

Just a quick follow-up to my last post. Seems my response stirred up some attention, and in the meantime I’ve done some more thinking and discussing and learned a bit more about what Squidi’s been up to.

Part of why I wrote up my thoughts was that I’m trying to sort them out. There’s a good chance I’ll be teaching some game design workshops in the fall (not because I’ve mastered it but because teaching is one of the best ways to learn more about something). I want to go into this with a decent perspective of what matters and what doesn’t, and be able to convey that to people who are new at this. I don’t want to stifle creative energy, but I also don’t want people setting themselves up to fail because of unrealistic expectations. Having already seen people come to me with a Great Idea which falls short of reality in horrible ways, I want to know how to help people get off of that train-wreck track as quickly as possible and get to making some awesome.

But this time I let myself get sucked into interweb drama, which is never a good idea. I was wrong in some ways, and more importantly I set myself up as The Voice Of Sanity when I’m still floundering through this process myself. Plus I started off with a wrong idea of where Squidi was coming from when he’s probably got more game industry experience than I do. Oops.

So, minus ten points to me for perpetuating internet angsts and misjudging people. Plus a few points for learning something in the process.

Squidi has posted some follow-up thoughts on the value of ideas, and I think he’s onto something:

The idea sets the boundaries. A bad idea with a good implementation may actually be worse than a great idea with a bad implementation. Everything that you can do, every implementation, every possibility, and every potential is embodied by the idea. In other words, the idea defines the range of quality that is possible.

I think I can agree with that, or at least move in that direction. Personally I would add that real-world experience in testing and building on ideas gives you a greater ability to sort out the good ideas from the bad. But that doesn’t change the fact that starting with a crap idea will probably never give you an awesome game. (Unless it’s B-Game Comp awesome, I guess, but now we’re trapped in an infinite loop of semantics.) I’m pretty sure you could also take an amazing idea and completely trash it with shoddy implementation, so maybe ideas are more like an upper bound, or a mean value of a set of possibilities with a long tail downwards into potential craptasticness. But now I’m drawing too many little graphs in my head and no good can come of that.

Ascii Dreams draws attention to a comment thread discussion following coverage of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at this year’s GDC. One of the games featured at the workshop, Lost in the Static, was based on an idea explicitly borrowed from a list of 300 game concepts released by indie developer writer Squidi as a creative exercise.

In the discussion, Squidi expresses frustration that a game based on his concept got attention at the GDC, while his proposal to discuss the 300 games list he created was rejected.

So, for example, by virtue of spending two days hacking together a generic platforming game, Lost in the Static is elevated above the original inspiration that spawned it? Is that why it is up there on the stage? Because of the code or because of the gimmick? It’s up there on behalf of sweat, not talent. What message does that send?

Two of the EGW organizers as well as Sean Barrett, the creator of Lost in the Static, respond to Squidi’s complaint. Sean gives very explicit credit to Squidi, as he did at the EGW, but he makes a good case against dismissing his contribution to the game’s design as trivial.

Despite the slightly flamewar-ish nature of the end of the thread, there’s a very foundational lesson to be learned here about game design. Squidi doesn’t seem to get it, but the other (very experienced) developers in discussion with him do their best to bring it to light. The way I’ve tried to explain it over the last few years goes something like this:

Ideas are cheap.

Now, I think I’ve probably undersold the creative process (including my own) by phrasing it that way; I’ve run short on brilliant design ideas in the past and it can take deliberate effort to push oneself creatively when working on a project. So sometimes ideas can be hard despite their cheapness.

But an idea is not a design. I’ve seen this misconception in game design, engineering, and I’m starting to see it in visual design as well. Someone (possibly myself) comes up with an idea which, in their mind, will be fantastic and revolutionize things and probably make them bucketloads of money. All they need is to find someone to implement the details, and success!

The problem is that in game design, as well as in almost any endeavor, the design is quite literally in the details. It’s possible to create both a well-designed fun game and a horribly boring game which both stay faithful to the same original concept. (Adding “It must be fun and awesome!” to the concept description is cheating, in the thought experiment as well as real life.) Like probably everyone else who’s ever played a game, I used to think, “Wouldn’t it be great to be the one who comes up with all the cool ideas, and everyone else can do the hard work? Being a game designer would be great!” The problem is, that doesn’t describe a game designer. (Maybe it describes the type of Executive Producer or Studio CEO who likes to drop by and periodically insist that Feature X be added to the game, but trust me, that doesn’t make you a hero.)

Now, many high-level concepts can sound great on paper but completely fall apart when you try to implement them. This is why engineers shake their heads when someone “invents” a revolutionary new energy storage mechanism which falls apart the moment you do any back-of-the-napkin calculations. Now, this does mean that there are “bad ideas”, so ideas aren’t completely without value. But there are two hurdles to overcome. You may not know an idea is bad until you look at the implementation details, or have enough experience to see them coming. Even if an idea isn’t bad at its core, it still requires good design work to take it from “interesting (or marketable) idea” to “great game design”.

Game design is, like any form of design work, about crafting the details into a coherent experience. The game concept or idea is a target, but there are many ways of getting there and not all of them will succeed. Good design work needs to address many different concerns such as complexity, accessibility, aesthetics, technical limitations, and more - and none of these concerns can be fully answered without specific, hard details.

(I don’t know if I’m warping terminology by calling this a post-mortem, but since the project is dead it seems appropriate.)

Quadrix is a game concept I came up with last year. It was inspired by Jesper Juul’s writeup on the history of tile-matching games. At the time, I was playing a lot of Planet Puzzle League on the DS as well as digging deeper into the casual games world. Seeing the family tree in Juul’s essay made me reflect on how Tetris has this obscure but substantial place in the history of matching tile games. Despite this, the emphasis on spatial geometry in Tetris hasn’t exactly mapped to tile-matching games, or at least not in the same way. Rather than looking for shapes to fill gaps, the tile-matching player is scanning for colors to bring together.

So when I was looking for a “quick” game concept I could use to get my feet wet in Flash game development, I decided to try to create a new branch in the family tree. Quadrix’s goal was to combine the four-block shape emphasis of Tetris with the color-matching emphasis of more recent tile-matching games.

The rules:

Use the mouse cursor to swap two blocks horizontally. When a change occurs, the game looks for tetromino shapes that have been formed of the same color, checking for any instances of one tetromino configuration before looking for another. eg. All possible L-shapes get cleared before any four-in-a-row shapes are recognized. The screen begins and is kept filled with blocks, with new blocks dropping down as others are cleared. (I didn’t decide on end-game or scoring yet; my intention was to play with the prototype and experiment with those rules.)

I got a semi-working version of this concept up and running; it’s slow, it’s a bit buggy, and as with the above rules it doesn’t have a proper scoring mechanism or end goal. But disclaimers aside, you can take a look at it here:

Quadrix prototype build

What went wrong

1) Weird design goals. Conceptually, my goal was to create an experience in the player of scanning for tetrominos, gaining a natural familiarity with them and pushing their geometric pattern-matching. In a sense this was my attempt to give some “props” back to Tetris from within the world of tile-matching games. While this sort of worked in my own mind as I tested it, initial responses from others who weren’t already in that mindset were that this was simply matching four of a color instead of three - in other words, it felt completely derivative.

I did have some ideas on how to better convey the tetromino focus through presentation and animation, as well as in the scoring. My thought for scoring was to give fewer points for easily-created tetrominos, and more points for the rarer ones. Animations in the scoring window on the side would highlight the prioritization in a simple way - eg. by illustrating the shapes and lighting them up in a fast sequence as the game scanned for matches. However, I couldn’t convince myself that this would overcome the real problem of the game’s core mechanic simply not feeling unique enough.

2) Coding and production time. This was supposed to be my “quick” project to get me kick-started before I put time into a different project. Unfortunately, what I didn’t account for was that matching tetrominos in arbitrary configurations within a grid of blocks is actually a little trickier to program than a simple check for a filled row or three-in-a-row. And because I was fixated on emphasizing tetrominos, I couldn’t simply match any group of blocks of size four or greater. And even worse, if I wanted to score specific shapes differently and prioritize how they were cleared, I couldn’t just check for any arbitrary match of four connected shapes!

These problems did all get solved, but the code tended towards being over-engineered and it took much longer than I had intended. By the time I had it working, I felt like I had committed too much time to simply throw the idea away if it didn’t work. This added more indecision to how I budgeted my time, which was the last thing I needed.

What went right!

1) It succeeded in giving me practice in Flash coding. The game would still need to be optimized for speed, and some bugs to fix, but from a coding perspective this was largely a success. I got past a few hurdles and made it work. I also learned a lot about my own coding style - I tend to over-engineer if I’m lost, which is something for me to keep an eye out for in the future. I spent some time after this project playing with much less code-ambitious Flash toys and forced myself to use as little overhead as possible, just to get a feel for quick, light hacking in Flash. Hopefully this’ll help me choose the right balance between formal OOP and “throw code on Movie Clip instances” in the future.

2) Deciding to stop. No, seriously. I could have kept pushing at this and trying to force it to be fun and wasted much more of my time than I did. This was a good exercise in the somewhat painful task of dropping a project when the prototype is indicating that the core gameplay isn’t really there.

3) Finding an art style I could handle. I’m studying art, but I’m much more comfortable with technical media (photography, code) than I am with drawing. Despite this, I was determined to come up with something that at least had a coherent visual style. I’m happy with the vector-based, hand-drawn look that was emerging. Of course, I dodged the real challenge by stopping before trying to integrate a background image and a more complete visual theme. But “clean, simple, and cute” was a good combination.

Conclusion

Hopefully this can be a learning experience for others; it definitely was one for me. Good game design is an experimental art, and learning from “failures” is part of the process.

I still maintain all rights to the game as it stands, naturally. There’s still a part of me that wishes this design could get somewhere useful and be fun, so if you think it’s worth revisiting, don’t just steal this .swf or clone it - talk to me! There’s no sense in others duplicating my effort, and if someone wants to make use of this prototype to create a finished game I’m very willing to sign up for a deal that’s fair to all parties.

I spoke again at TWU for a game development project class. This is an info dump update of links to sites and games I mentioned.

Step one: my link-dump from last year’s presentation. Clicky here for a big long list.

Things that I learned about more recently that aren’t in that older post:

Dwarf Fortress is an extreme example of how indie games have the freedom to completely abandon the expectations of mainstream industry games. Text-based, cryptic controls, micromanagement sim & roguelike insanity.  (Of course, he also isn’t asking anyone to pay for the game.)

Cactus! This guy is nuts, often in a good way. Check out “Clean Asia!”, the IGF award nominee, to make your eyes bleed, or Psychonomium for a weird exercise in experimental and/or insane game-based storytelling.

Bit Blot are the makers of Aquaria, a game which despite being done in true indie fashion is also very polished and professionally made. Pick up the demo for a good taste of the more polished, commercial end of the indie spectrum.

Novel Concept’s new tower defense game, Flash Element Tower Defense 2, is a prime example of the Tower Defense genre that has sprung up in the Flash games scene. You may also want to check out Desktop Tower Defense, created by one of Novel Concept’s partners (and probably the most popular Flash game of 2007 - in fact one mainstream games blogger listed it as one of his Top 10 games of 2007 overall.) Also, hey, I just realized there’s now a Multiplayer DTD on Novel Concept’s Flash portal, The Casual Collective!

Something else I didn’t give much mention but which the class should probably look into: the IGF’s Student Showcase. I just gave the entrance rules a quick skim, and I think you should be eligible even though you’re selling the game afterwards. Take a look yourself at the submission site here. Your game needs to be at least at beta status (ie. feature-complete) before submission, but once it is this is a potential way to gain extra visibility above and beyond normal indie publishing / marketing routes.

And to close things off with a bang, the game which was described as possibly the most indie ever for being a game no publisher would ever touch: Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden. Be sure to click the links to see the DX9 / DX10 comparison. (Made using RPGMaker, which I really ought to have mentioned alongside AGS and GameMaker.)

So, I have a confession to make. I’ve been playing a Pokémon game.

Okay, that’s kind of a laughable confession seeing as how I’ve “caught ‘em all” way back when the original Gameboy game came out. Mock all you want, it was a pretty solid RPG, and the collecting via link-cable trading was a clever way to create a social aspect to the game. (Too bad the money-leeching trading card variety took over; but I digress.)

But! I am not playing Diamond or Pearl, but Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) is the latest Western release of the Mystery Dungeon series of games developed by Chunsoft. Mystery Dungeon is a series I learned about last year via GameSetWatch’s @Play series of blog posts about roguelikes. You play the part of a Pokémon yourself, rather than a trainer, and you go off on rescue missions facing up against rogue (*cough* sorry) Pokémon who have been driven wild by strange natural disasters. And yes, this is definitely a roguelike. You can faint from lack of food. Dungeons are randomly generated, everything is turn-based reacting to player actions, and the random number generator can drive you mad (eventually).

In a lot of ways, PMD starts off feeling like nethack-lite. You can keep experience and levels even if you fail a dungeon, coming back in at a higher level to give it another try. You can also bring in multiple pokémon with you, where you control one main character (or later on, whichever you designate to be the leader) and the other pokémon are AI-controlled. As well, you can generally hoard items and choose which ones to bring into a given dungeon dive with you at the start.

Ok, so from what I understand, the other Mystery Dungeon games allow you to hoard items to some extent - but keeping levels? While at first glance this made the game feel easier, later on when trying to clear a dungeon that expects you to be starting at level 50 and you’re coming in at 45, it begins to feel like you’re being asked to exp-grind. Brrrr.

But thinking about it some more, I suspect that this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to move towards exp-grind-scariness. Allowing the player to keep exp levels means that the game can stick true to the source material. Your Pokémon gain the same abilities in PMD as they do in other Pokémon titles, at the same levels. I suspect that they also gain levels from exp points at the same rate as they do in other Pokémon games. What this means is that Chunsoft didn’t have to mess with Pokémon canon; nor did they have to deal with the nightmare of trying to edit and rebalance the level rates and abilities of some 300+ different Pokémon.

And for the roguelike purists (aka masochists), there are dungeons unlocked later in the game which allow (okay, force) you to start at level 1 and work your way from scratch, becoming something more like a standard roguelike dive. Wish Cave allows you to bring in items and extra party members, but forces a save at the start (forcing you to commit to those items you brought with, which are likely to be lost if you fail to complete the dungeon). Purity Forest gives you zero concessions - you bring in your lone leader Pokémon, no items, starting at level 1, and you won’t be able to recruit any additional help along the way. It’s friggin’ hard, and I haven’t completed either.

The eventually-hardcore roguelike nature of PMD also helps explain why the reviews were so mediocre. I finally just ignored all but the reviewer I found who actually mentioned “roguelike” - coincidentally, one of the only reviews really praising the game. But the player looking for a roguelike on their DS is going to have very, very different expectations than the player looking for a new Pokémon game. And may God have mercy on their tormented souls if they expect to go into this game and catch ‘em all! It is possible to recruit one of every Pokémon in the game onto your rescue team, but that’s a little bit like trying to tame one of every type of monster in Nethack - or a better analogy might be trying to ascend with a tamed monster until you’ve ascended with ‘em all, since recruits have to survive until you complete or escape from the dungeon without fainting. It’s no wonder that most of the hardcore players who wrote the online guides to the game expressed a lot of frustration.

But if a roguelike is what you’re expecting and looking for, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon isn’t a bad way to go. If nothing else it can keep you occupied until the original Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer comes to the DS on March 4th.

I was playing with my grandkids, who, at that time, happened to have that very problem - separating out the fiction of the game from the reality of play. So, we played with only two baby frogs: the “Happy Frog” and the “Sad Frog.”… No one “owned” either of the frogs. We were like gods, cheering for the Happy frog when the Happy frog won. Cheering for the Sad frog when she got to move.

From Bernie DeKoven’s latest blogging. What a fantastic way to skip the heartache of competitive failure! And even better, by attaching personalities to the game pieces instead of relating them to the players themselves, it turns the entire exercise into a little story-making machine. The Happy Frog has fallen behind! Will he still be happy? Is the Sad frog no longer sad? Maybe they’re both happy now and they can be friends!

I wonder if this kind of twist on competitive gameplay can actually reinforce healthy direct competition later on as well. Where by “healthy”, of course I really mean the sort of competition I prefer - where no one takes things too personally, everyone tries their best, and the fun of exploring the game’s strategies and mechanics makes even losing to a well-played game enjoyable. (I’m sure people who prefer to dive headlong into high-stakes, I-will-be-upset-if-I-lose competition think they’re being perfectly healthy too, but they sure do seem to make it harder for me to have fun.) Anyway, maybe teaching kids how to detach themselves from the direct personal connection to winning and losing early on can help that healthy sort of competition to come out later in life.

Jonathon Blow has made the full audio and PowerPoint slides from his MGS talk available on his website.  You can grab them here.  He doesn’t think that the news coverage of the presentation is as thorough as I thought it seemed, and recommends listening to the whole thing before trying to judge the merits of his argument.  His presentations are generally good stuff so I’ll recommend it as well; or if you want to wait, it sounds like he might be putting together a video combining the slides and audio.