The Wayward WebLog : Gaming

Tempted by Halo

mattwar — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 22:30:00 GMT

I'm tempted to blow off work for the rest of the week and spend the time playing Halo 2. It's that compelling. I don't know why I want to do it. Is it just because everyone else is doing it? I don't even own an XBox. Now that's a startling revelation. You'd think I'd have one by now. After all I can get the games for dirt cheap. I might be willing to buy a machine just to play Halo. But then again, I'm not so much a game addict as I make myself out to be. Certainly not so by the standards of most around here. And it will be out on the PC soon enough. Just wait.

Still, I guess what is most keeping me at bay at the moment is not my lack of interest in the game nor lack of console, but my parental danger-sense. Last week my four-year-old son came to me and told me of this fun game he saw older boys playing at the store. It was a fighting and shooting game, not something he has ever seen at home before. He wanted me to show him how to play a fighting and shooting game.

I told him no.

Matt

Halo, can you hear me now?

mattwar — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:56:00 GMT

I played my first game of Halo last night. Not Halo 2 mind you, the developers only just finished that up recently and while I might technically be an 'insider' I haven't had access to any pre release versions of that one. I'm talking about the bona-fide original product. I opened up the box sometime after 10pm and launched into a game of kill or be killed mayhem, against the PC, on 'easy' mode. I figured I should probably give it a spin before the new one is out. After all, its been sitting in its box on the shelf for nearly a year, waiting, calling, daring me to open it, but I've resisted. I can't do it. There are already too many games loaded onto the PC, unfinished, frozen in save game stasis for all eternity.

But it looked so sad sitting there, unwanted, unplayed. I figured I ought to at least once boot the thing before its completely obsolete, shake out the system and let it run for a while. That's why I ran it through on easy mode. Not to spare my fragile male ego, my inability to point and click and fire off a hundred rounds, but to spare the software the nightmare of finally being booted, only to replay level one over and over again. It was charity on my part to allow it a chance to fully express itself and all of its graphics, in one glorious night of digital demolition.

The game was great, however, it still let me down in one regard. Where were the vampires and the floating cities? And I did not meet one Pak Protector! And guys, the secret weapon controls are inside Mons Olympus on the map of Mars.

But you probably already knew that.

Matt

Gaming Discourse

mattwar — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 04:23:00 GMT

I went to lunch with my brother today. This is a somewhat common occurrence. We are both soldiers for the Empire. We usually talk about programming or family business, but often we get deep into discourse over his recent gaming/macro-ing exploits. I have often wondered what it might sound like to the casual observer sitting next to us in an adjacent booth. Today I had the displeasure to find out.

Seated near us was another pair of thirty-something, t-shirt garbed micro-brethren locked into their own vigorous banter, gesticulating rapidly, almost shouting with undue enthusiasm over their own on-line exploits. Their conversation went something like this. “And then I went, wap, wap, bam, bam, bam” Hands were in the air, chopping in rapid succession, tiny little jabs meant to simulate the miniature feel of the actual on-screen weapon held by their own tiny avatar. “And then he went jawaah, bop, bop, and I went fahwing, fwap, fwap, and he went down.”

I was embarrassed for them. Really I was. It reminded me of being a goofy teenager, standing in the hallway of my high school chatting with my gaming buddies. “And then we both took out our holy symbols and rolled 20's! Pow! The skeletons were dust.“

Matt

Aspect Oriented Programming

mattwar — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:14:00 GMT

There’s been a lot of hype lately over this new fangled paradigm known as Aspect Oriented Programming. You might have heard it mentioned on another blog or in some technical article on the fringe of the mediaverse. You probably scratched your head and skimmed over the article, not certain what to make of the whole thing. That’s what I did the first time I came across it. The second time, I didn’t even bother reading. But these kinds of things tend to snowball after a while. A little reference here, a comment there, and a bunch of feedback from real users eventually gets your attention. So when you’re a guy like my at a company like this, you have a duty to bone up on new trends, to make every effort to rationalize new ideas and to eventually determine if these new things get folded into the product or not.

So I did some research last week and came to some sort of opinion on the whole matter. To tell you the truth, this new Aspect-Oriented thing has a lot of goodness for the programmer. The gist of it is the ability to align fragments of your program (orient them) around different Aspects (qualities or representations). These blocks of code then become molded by their governing Aspect when the code is fully compiled, transforming them and their environs into something much greater. Your code automatically takes on powers attributed to it by its chosen Aspect.

This is really a revolutionary new way of looking at programming. I mean, before this I just assumed all code was neutral, behaving only as explicitly stated. But now everything is different. Now your code can be aligned to a higher power.

The only problem you have is in deciding which Aspect to choose from. I know there are not that many available yet, as there are only a few listed in the reference material, but some have goodies you just can’t pass up. I mean, take a look at the Aspect of Bane. That guy is pretty nasty with an aura of fear and 10 foot reach. Orcus is even better; Blindsight, Cleave and Death Blow. I definitely wouldn’t want to mess with any code owned by the Aspect of Lolth either.

The only thing that really bugs me, is that so far the trend is for all the Aspects to represent evil gods. Is this just some wacky coincidence, or is there deeper meaning here? Sure, you could suspect by inference that all software developed by the Evil Empire would retain some residual evilness, but could that be the norm throughout programmer-dom?

And certainly, there are going to be many programmers out there that just won’t desire to have their code adopt a religion (albeit fictional) that is different from their own. Sure, many programmers are gamers too, but should the two mix? You know what they say about business and pleasure.

But I digress

Where's the Beef?

mattwar — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 07:49:00 GMT

I was dreaming about computer games again. I was not asleep at the time, but that’s no matter because my thoughts were about as far from reality that computer game makers will ever dare to tread. I’ve asked around to some of my mmorpg playing friends for their thoughts so I thought I would also do the same with the rest of you.

If you recall from an earlier post, I don’t play mmorpg’s anymore because none cater to me as an infrequent player. Which is silly because a player like me would still pay the monthly fee but hardly ever suck down any cpu time. You’d think that would be how you maximized profit. Still, sometimes I wonder what it is that keeps me away other than not having enough time in the day to participate at a useful level. My earlier post made the point that I just did not play enough to advance through much if any of the content of the game. But now that I think about it, these games don’t have content. None at all. And I guess that’s what keeps me from booting up.

I know that may be a shocker to some of the actual game designers out there. I’m not disparaging the incredible work that goes into the art, the client, the server, the general game mechanics, et al. It’s just that the actual content, the itty bitty dribbles of plot injected primarily as ‘quests’ leave a lot to be desired. It’s not that they are bad per say, just that they are either too little or too inconsequential.

How can this be so? Well, for one, there are generally a few thousand people on your server at anyone time that have already accomplished that particular quest. If somehow you ignore the websites with all the secrets revealed, ignore all the chit-chat discussing the how-to’s and what-for’s and really, truly try to go it alone, you usually still end up in some dungeon somewhere trying to complete a task with a hoard of other players already in the process of doing the same. You can’t close your eyes. You can’t help but complete it without much mental effort, following the lead of everyone else. With everything already solved, your only real challenge is your deft finger clicking. These games devolve into level-quests, where the players rabidly click on the mouse button in rapid-fire motions, drooling uncontrollably, waiting for the pellets to drop. This is not content; it’s just random conditioned response.

A real game is something that continues to challenge. I’m not a chess player but I’ll use an analogy to it. You might think the ‘content’ of a game of chess is the set of rules that make up the game. It is not. The rules define the playing field, not the challenge. The challenge is the other player. If you are under matched, you will trounce the other player and will have no fun. An online mmorpg without real content is like playing a chess game against a toddler. Because you are not competing against one another except for bragging rights. You are playing against the pre-canned quests that are easily analyzed by thousands of players.

It is incredible irony that you are actually playing a game with thousands of other actual people all at the same time and are not truly challenged by any one of them. Sure there are things like player-versus-player combat. But this is hardly a challenge. It generally goes to the player with the most beefed up character. Some games encourage mass battles against teams of players, defend a stronghold or lay siege to one. This goes a little way toward making the game a tad interesting, but its just a combat simulator with no real twist or turn except for which particular spell the enemy casters will employ.

What we really need is an online game that puts the control of content into the hands of the players directly. Imagine a MMORPG that is like a massively multiplayer version of Dungeon Keeper, where individual players (given some status) are actually capable of hollowing out hills, building dungeons, deploying traps, fielding monsters and hiding treasures. Of course, this would all cost the building player in-game monies or equivalent to be able to do this. But think of it. There would be an endless supply of original content, challenges posed by players against other players. “Hey, I bet you can’t take on my keep. It is killer!” “The first one to the bottom wins the burning sword of neputopia!” Maybe the builders earn points depending on how many heroes fail at the task.

This kind of challenge would solve the PVP pettiness that plagues most online worlds. Challenges would be set, but players would still have to choose to take them on.

Now that would be something.

Matt

Getting in the Game

mattwar — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 20:37:00 GMT

What is it with games? I think there are only maybe five actual games on the market, every other one is just basically the same one redone with new graphics, a slight variation of data. I’ve been a game consumer for a long time, and have at times dabbled in game design, though I’m no professional at it. Like many others, I started out writing games on a computer. That’s how I pushed myself to learn what the box could do. Sure, I amazed and dazzled my friends, but the games themselves just always seemed to be lacking something. In the end they always felt one dimensional, an obvious goal or challenge requiring a bit of skill and a lot of luck. I found it the same with the games I’ve purchased and played. I found it wasn’t some skill I just lacked. I started to get the idea that there was just something lacking in the paradigm, something broken.

I guess there was just nothing unexpected, no real mystery even to a game based on a mystery. It was probably because the games were design by people with a limited ability to express their ideas. The plots were fixed like a story, or could possibly unfold in a variety of fixed ways. Some games mix in skill-based challenges with a fixed plot, others mix in puzzles, but still they remain primarily static things.

I was talking to my brother yesterday. He’s plays a lot of Acheron’s call and likes to grumble about whatever deficiency du jour that might be troubling its players. I try to read between the lines when he talks and pick out what I think really matters. I see what often bugs him is that the content is so fixed. Sure it gets updates every so often, as do most games of its ilk, but the new content is soon revealed and usually most know all the details long before they encounter it in game. There is no real mystery; you just end up going through the motions, with thousands of other people doing the same thing.

What I really want to have is a personalized experience, even in a multi-player game. I want the game to adapt to me and spin me my own little tale. I want to be the hero of the story, or at least my part of the adventure, and I want my experience to be very much different than everyone else’s.

I’m not sure how this is done, but I know that if it is that AI will be involved in just about every aspect of the game. Games have integrated AI before, but never to this degree. I used to be a real AI wonk when I was in college, and read a variety of books and journals on the subject. I know there are many possibly dead-end approaches to adaptive learning, etc, that could still be put to use as a form of entertainment. Instead of just applying this work to try to make robot cars travel over unexpected terrain, or to assembling blocks in a plethora of a patterns, let’s take this logic and apply it to simulations of environment, to plot structures and protagonists. Let’s make the game worlds come alive by giving them a mind.

So if you have ideas on this subject, please share them. Maybe if we put all our thoughts into a pot and stir in some potatoes, carrots and onion we might just make some soup.

Matt

Cheat Codes

mattwar — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 01:11:00 GMT

Betsy and I were playing Neverwinter again a few nights ago. We were having trouble with some metal behemoths. It seems our tactics and weapons were having no effect. We would have had a better weapon, but it was accidentally sold at the last merchant and we could not afford to get it back. The game has a huge discrepancy between what it will buy things from you versus how much it will charge you for the same item; about an order of magnitude difference. We should have reloaded after the mistake, but that would have meant slogging through a tedious encounter, so we sucked it up and just went on. Later we realized we were stuck. We didn’t know how to continue, so we cheated.

The game lets you manipulate a figure called a Dungeon Master if you so choose. I took control of the Dungeon Master and had him re-supply our missing item, and a few extra baubles I had my eye on. It’s not really cheating. After all we were running our own game. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your own business. It’s not really that much different than toggling the difficulty level on the options menu. It’s all about whether you are having fun. If you are not having fun, something is wrong, so hack it.

I’ve had this perspective on games since I was young. Back then, hacking a game meant stealing fake money from the Monopoly bank when no one was looking. When the game itself no longer provided a challenge, my brothers and I turned the game into a game of deception; clearly superior. Technically, that was cheating by the rules, but it became a new form of a game for us to play.

Later when I started playing computer games and developing programming skills I found newer ways to hack the games I played. Even back then, with meager graphics, games had the same set of shortcomings. Sometimes games turned out to be more puzzling that the makers intended, or bugs, actual bugs, kept you from completing them, or having fun. I had problems with the game, Temple of Apshai that ran on the Apple IIe and Atari. After a while, the slow pace of the game became tedious, and no longer fun. So I turned to the game of hacking the game. To do that, I had to reverse engineer the save file. After a few hours of study eventually I understood enough that I could write a program to edit certain aspects of the game. I could change just about any attribute of my in game character, and try out all sorts of bizarre combinations. The fun was just beginning.

Then there were cases such as Ultima II that had a bug in the Atari version. You could not complete the game, and it’s not like today where you can just download a patch over the Internet. You were just stuck. So I reverse engineered that save file too, and built a program to edit all sorts of settings. I put this one up on bulletin boards, so you may have seen it. No? For a few years, this is the sort of things I did after I became bored with or stuck inside a game. The real game/challenge/fun came from hacking the game itself.

Eventually, with college and a career, free-time became scarce. I stopped playing so many games and definitely had no time to tinker with cheats programs. So you can image how I felt after playing games like Baldur’s Gate a few years back and discovering that the playing community had built save-game editors. It brought a tear to my eye. It was just like old times.

Now with a game like Neverwinter, you don’t even have to bother. There is no point in modifying the save-game file. You can call up a Dungeon Master and have at it. You don’t have to spend hours scratching your head over hex dumps. You don’t have to tinker with programs, user-interfaces, etc. You don’t have to do any work at all.

Now that’s cheating!

But I digress.

Matt

Reality Check

mattwar — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 07:26:00 GMT

No Stargate tonight. They were all repeats of ones we had seen so Betsy and I played a hour of Neverwinter Nights instead. If you can't watch soldiers beating up on aliens on TV, the next best thing is to beat up on goblins yourself. We play cooperatively. A friend of mine offered advice about playing computer games with your wife. Don't' compete against each other. You'll only end up in a fight, for real. I think we instinctively understood this ourselves, so we team up and play against the computer. Still we each usually end up scrambling to get to the treasure first.

Last year we played Dungeon Siege. It was a lot of fun. Betsy is friends with Chris Taylor, who designed the game. She likes to rib him about how he created the best game for women. After all, isn't the whole point of the game to gather money so you can go shopping? The best part of the game is when you complete a mission and finally arrive in a town where you can buy new pieces of armor, mixing and matching the colors. Don't tell me that's not the reason everyone plays on-line role playing games like Everquest. Certainly, most everyone just goes out on missions to collect treasures like fancy colored armor that makes them look cooler.

I don't play on-line though. I tried a few times, but I just can't spend the time to make it worthwhile. Those games are designed to require you to keep advancing at the pace that the rest of the players are. I 'played' Everquest for five months when it first came out. I retired as a level 5 ranger. I don't think I ever advanced beyond the capability to fight wolves. I never got to see any interesting content of the game, because I could not put in the twenty hours a week. The game is metered to only dole out the content in little bits, so it has lasting power. Friends who continue to play these types of games report on different game systems and what not, as each one is somewhat different, but in the end they are all the same. I'll take a multi-player self-hosted games anytime.

Of course, the best feature of hosting your own game, is the reload option. I don't think we could play without it. Approaching the next door. What's beyond it? Better save the game here. Whoops, an ambush? Reload.

I wish life had a reload. I really do. Every time you encounter someone new there is a new chance to do something or say something stupid. If you could reload you could perfect the moment. You could keep trying until you finally did something just right, or found something incredibly clever to say. It would almost be like editing reality, like with a word processor with spell check. That would be a great product to sell, Reality Checker 1.0. Well, better not buy the first version; 3.0 then, that'd do it.

But I digress

Matt