Tales of the Rampant Coyote: Exception Driven Game Play

Rampant Coyote has an excellent post on exception driven game play in RPGs which ties in rather nicely with my series on randomness in RPGs(and not for the first time). It's a must read if you often find modern PC RPGs lacking compared to their less refined ancestors.

PS3 Mahjong

There's a nice summary of PS3 mahjong games on Hardcore Gaming 101. He includes some helpful links to translation guides.

Japanese Wizardry Reboot

Read all about it at 1Up.

L/N Review: Armored Core For Answer

Review of Armored Core For Answer
developed by From Software
for the Playstation 3
and released in North America in September 2008.

The charmingly titled Armored Core For Answer is From Software's most recent entry in their venerable mecha franchise and the second Armored Core release for current gen consoles. For Answer is a considerable improvement over its predecessor Armored Core 4, which introduced a faster paced but no less complex style of gameplay to the series. Part simulation, part action game, the Armored Core series demands commitment from the player and For Answer is no different. Player excellence requires both a fighter pilot's nervous system and a foolproof understanding of the scientific method.

The single player game consists of the player taking a customized mecha -- or AC in the game's parlance -- through a branching path of missions, unlocking more and more AC parts as he progresses. By the time the player has completed all of the missions, he will have played through the story mode multiple times and unlocked hundreds of parts with which to customize his ACs. More time will have been spent in the hangar fiddling with his ACs' multitude of components and conducting test simulations than will have been spent completing story missions. There are so many interacting parts and variables, so many possibilities, that real experimentation is required to understand how they all fit together. Hypotheses are formed, tested, rejected, and further refined until specialized engines of destruction are created for any potential scenario. The player can create optimized snipers, heavy tanks, lightning fast melee specialists, missile boats and more in countless variations. Proper planning in the lab will make some of the nail hard missions doable and may even make those coveted S Ranks attainable. And then, it is time for Hard mode.

When it comes time to actually pilot an AC, the speed of the ensuing action will be a shock to almost anyone who hasn't played Armored Core 4. But despite the frenetic pace, For Answer is still a simulation. An Armored Core is a machine with certain functions and capabilities, all of which are mapped to the control pad. There are three different varieties of boost, for instance. Normal boost is the standard mode of movement and doesn't consume any energy unless the AC is completely airborne. Quick boost is a rapid dash/dodge which consumes a chunk of energy. Finally, Over boost can be likened with piloting a drag racer and rapidly depletes both energy and kojima particles(KP). The consumption, power, and recovery rates of all these forms of movement and energy depend on the parts equipped, of course. The player must integrate all three types of movement while managing the resources they require. Energy reserves are also shared to power weapons and other functions while KP is also used to fuel the AC's shields and a few Kojima-powered weapons.

Movement and resource management are definitely the most complex parts of piloting an AC and are key to combat strategy, but they aren't the pilot's only concerns. An AC can be equipped with up to five weapons: left and right hand weapons, left and right back weapons, and a shoulder weapon. Spare weapons can also be stored to use if a hand weapon is depleted of ammo or is otherwise no longer needed. There is an array of weapon types powered by traditional ordinance, energy, and even Kojima particles. There are assault rifles, machine guns, bazookas, grenade launchers, energy blades, missiles, sniper rifles, plasma cannons, rail guns, and more. Thankfully, ACs have a degree of auto-targeting and lock-on with most weapons. Without auto-targeting, the high speed of combat would would make it almost impossible to hit anything.

The end result of all this complexity is that For Answer is one of the few games which really requires the player to dedicate two fingers on each hand to the controller's triggers. The game's button mappings are completely customizable, but the player should never have to take his fingers off the main boost buttons or left/right fire buttons. Although awkward at first, with practice the game's controls actually become quite natural. The initial awkwardness is due more to unfamiliarity than any design flaw.

Mechanically, then, the gameplay is excellent. The missions themselves are also nicely varied, without too many frustrating moments. Past Armored Core games usually had a few relatively unexciting but hard missions with strict time limits. Thankfully, in For Answer the hardest missions are those where the player must face off against one or more opposing ACs. The most prominent missions however are those where the goal is to eliminate one of the gigantic moving fortresses known as Arms Forts. These missions are quite dramatic, but unfortunately -- at least on Normal Difficulty -- are a bit anti-climatic. Most of the Arms Forts can be taken out with a few swipes of a melee weapon once within range.

Aside from the main campaign, there are also numerous 1 vs 1 arena battles against AI opponents. These will serve as good practice before venturing online. Online there are team and survival battles with up to eight players. Between matches, players can chat and trade schematics. Overall, the online experience is much improved over Armored Core 4, although there are still instances of lag in certain circumstances.

The narrative of For Answer is sparse to say the least. As in previous games in the series, For Answer features a completely silent protagonist. The plot unfolds through mission briefings, in-mission communications, and brief cut scenes between chapters. These elements combine to beautifully capture the moral ambiguity of war. There are numerous factions, none of which except for one is clearly good or evil. As a mercenary, the player will work for almost all of them and it will likely take multiple playthroughs for the player to piece together the goals of each. The understated and biased mission briefings contribute greatly to the moral fog of war. A mission targeting 100 million civilians sits innocuously next to the mission to save them. Moral judgments on the player's part must be made in a vacuum of emotion, because there are few emotional cues in the business of war. The few scenes which do draw on human emotion are quite poignant as a result. Aiding the narrative further is a beautiful musical score, solid presentation, and sometimes dramatic imagery. The mecha designs are unique and quite evocative.

Armored Core For Answer is one of the deepest games around. The hours will while themselves by with the player lost in its systems. The music and creative design will suck him in further and the plot will sustain interest and never fall flat. For Answer is one of the high points of the series.


On a normally distributed scale from 3 to 18, Armored Core For Answer scores:

17 for Ludology
15 for Narratology

For an explanation of my L/N scoring system, read my posts on the theory and the implementation.

Street Fighter at Seven Thousand Feet

I love travel writing and this gaming related piece at Bitmob is no exception. Ah, sipping fine Darjeeling tea while playing street fighter in a shack in the Himalayas. Romantic isn't it?

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: RPG Design: In Defense of ... Hit Points

Another great post at Tales of the Rampant Coyote. This one discusses the pros and cons of "hit points" in RPG design. The comments are especially interesting and include discussion of pen and paper classics like Rolemaster and Cyberpunk as well as new electronic games like Dwarf Fortress.

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: RPG Design: That Which Is Not Forbidden...

Very interesting post at Tales of the Rampant Coyote which ties in directly with my concept of player input variance and open-endedness in RPGs. In discussing two of Gary Gygax's published pen-and-paper adventures:

But both Tomb of Horrors and Necropolis left a lot up to interpretation by the Dungeon Master (the person who "runs" the game). And I try and run my games by a guiding rule which, lamentably, tends to be ignored in more recent editions of the game, and ignored by players who are used to computer games: That which is not expressly forbidden is fair game to try.

And the conclusion:

The problem is that - for the most part - RPGs aren't made as anything resembling simulations. That's too difficult, and it is too hard to put the player on the kinds of rails that many designers prefer. So spells have very particular, extremely limited uses, and tend to be more of the "blow crap up" variety. Spells that provide knowledge, hints, or "intelligence" are subject to exploit in single-player games, as the information they provide to the player is persistent, even when the player reloads the game immediately to 'restore' the expended spell.

Our worlds are just too restrictive to allow this kind of play. But do they have to be?

They definitely do not have to be so restrictive. One way to deal with the issue is through random procedural content. Another is by limiting the ability to save/reload. Roguelike developers already care about these issues. I'm just waiting for the mainstream to catch on and it makes me very happy to see someone else talking about it.

Randomness and the Black Swan in RPGS(Part 2)

In the last two entries of this series I discussed the role of randomness in RPG task resolution mechanics. I also demonstrated the current shift toward increasingly deterministic resolution systems in electronic RPGs, and I explained why I felt this was a bad thing. Now it is time to don the mantle of chaos once again and discuss the other major set of RPG systems influenced by randomness, content generation systems. I will also introduce a couple of conceptual tools which may prove useful in my analysis.

In most P&P RPGs, randomness exerts its influence from the very beginning, at character creation. Anyone who has played any edition of Dungeons and Dragons is familiar with summing the results of 3 6-sided dice to determine a character's ability scores like strength, intelligence, etc. Hit points for both players and monsters are also determined by rolling dice. These are all simple ways in which randomness feeds into the content generation systems of RPGs. Simple randomness ensures that all orcs aren't exactly the same. The inclusion of this type of randomness also means that one player's 3rd level fighter may be more powerful than another player's. However, the greater the number of attributes with randomly determined parameters, the more likely most characters will trend towards average overall and the more likely most characters will excel in some area.

Random character generation was one of the first random elements of P&P RPGs to be removed from electronic RPGs. Aside from licensed D&D games and roguelikes, few electronic RPGs still have random elements in their character generation systems. In many electronic RPGs there isn't even such a thing as character generation. This is entirely logical for story-based games and games without much in the way of randomized content generation. But, when the challenges to be met aren't predetermined, why shouldn't an RPG utilize randomness from the very beginning to vary the game experience?

But when most people think of random content generation, they think of randomly generated environments, encounters, and rewards. All of these elements were present in D&D in the 1970s. In general, every encounter area was expected to have an associated wandering monster table. The DM made periodic wandering monster checks, and if one occurred, the appropriate table was consulted. This allowed the DM to generate encounters on the fly while the party was travelling long distances or camping. Wandering monster checks could also be used to punish players for making foolish decisions like making a lot of noise in a dungeon. The AD&D Dungeon Masters' Guide included encounter tables for all types of wilderness terrain and dungeon levels. There were also tables to generate treasure on the fly for these and other encounters. Each monster type had an associated treasure type with an associated set of tables for randomly determining what treasure a monster of that type might have in its possession. There was a very slight chance that even a weak creature could have a powerful magical item.

With the release of the AD&D Dungeon Masters' Guide in 1978, random content generation was taken to the next level with the inclusion of a complete system for randomly generating dungeons. Level layouts, environmental details, tricks, traps, treasure, and enemy encounters could all be generated on the fly by the DM. The inclusion of such a system says volumes about the way at least some players played P&P RPGs. It is also some indication that, at least for some players, the mechanics of D&D were fun in and of themselves.

Of course, it should be mentioned that the Dungeon Master's Guide explicitly states that the content generation charts contained therein are not to be taken as Law. The DM can freely ignore any result he feels will unbalance the game or which he simply doesn't like. However, potentially unbalancing random events are ameliorated somewhat by the flexibility of a game played between humans. If the players suffer a stroke of bad luck and encounter a high level wandering monster they have a practically infinite number of options available to them, limited only by their creativity. They can scatter in all directions, they can describe in detail their attempts to hide or escape, etc. The DM can then reward quick thinking and good ideas. Contrast this with early electronic RPGS where the only option besides fighting was selecting RUN from a battle menu and it is easy to see why the range of random encounters might have been restricted.

Now I would like to introduce two concepts: content generation variance and player input variance, hereafter referred to as CGV and PIV. CGV is a measure for the range of output possible by the content generation system given a fixed set of parameters. CGV is easy to quantify in a video game because it is essentially an algorithmic function with specified parameters. PIV is harder to quantify because it always involves human input. Sometimes, such as with menu systems, the human input is very restricted, but many modern RPGs are much more open ended than that. In addition, PIV is also a result of the way in which human input is processed and translated into game actions. PIV takes into account randomness within the game's task resolution systems(see Part 1 for more details), for instance. So, PIV is defined as the range of results from all possible player actions in a given game situation. PIV will remain a fuzzy concept, but will suffice for our purposes. A P&P RPG played between humans will be considered as having maximum values for both CGV and PIV.

Next time I will continue the discussion of CGV and PIV. I will discuss how they relate to one another and how they have changed over the years in RPGs.

Randomness and the Black Swan in RPGS(Part 1.5)

Before looking at the random generation of game content in Part 2, I want to elaborate on a point made in Part 1 concerning combat mechanics: "The point of this comparison is that predictability isn't necessarily more fun because it is "balanced", sometimes it is just boring. And if it would be boring in a pen and paper game, then fundamentally, it is probably still boring electronically. It is just dressed up in a such a way that people put up with it."

Admittedly, I glossed over all the elements which can compensate for predictability in a electronic RPG's combat system. For one, the game can require the player to manage an assortment of abilities/skills in a real-time situation where tactical decisions must be made quickly and the player has to adapt to evolving situations. This is the approach taken by most MMORPGs, and some, like World of Warcraft, do it well. I still argue that too much predictability is a negative, though. Few encounters in such a system are unique and there is a very clear delineation between encounters the player can handle and encounters he can't. It is common for a player to find himself in a situation where if he draws/lures one enemy he will win fairly easily, but if he draws two he will die. This type of certainty reduces the depth of decision making. The challenge is moved firmly into the realm of player execution.

Interestingly, Final Fantasy 12, which I used as an example of predictable combat, seems to recognize that its base combat mechanics aren't very interesting on their own. Recognizing that the opportunities for complex decision-making in Final Fantasy combat are fairly rare, the developers automated the system. The combat in Final Fantasy 12 plays out in real-time according to simple, player-assigned AI rules controlling each character's actions. The player can pause the action and intervene if necessary, but this is rarely required outside of boss battles. Instead, the player takes satisfaction from tweaking his party's AI until it is as self-sufficient as possible.

The lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth, an open source turn-based strategy game, explains why his game has a substantial random element in its combat mechanics here. He makes a number of excellent points that apply just as well to role-playing games:

In Wesnoth we want a player to plan out a complex situation, to estimate carefully the possibilities. To have to work out a good strategy. If a player can simply rely on all sorts of assurances that their units will hit, they don't have to do any of this. Sure, there will be a certain amount of fun to planning out a situation where you can set up a cool 'domino effect' of enemy units going down as you attack them. But this is nothing to do with the skill of planning out a real strategy in a dynamic situation where you have to consider all kinds of contingencies.

...

Trying to "slide down the scale" of luck would simply make Wesnoth less interesting, in my view. Suddenly the difference between a two attack unit and a four attack unit would be trifling instead of critical. Not near as much planning would be necessary. Simply, in my view, Wesnoth would become less fun.

The point I want to make in this post is that although predictability can be compensated for, especially if the combat system plays out in real-time, an infusion of unpredictability into the system can make it even more interesting.

Randomness and the Black Swan in RPGs (Part 1)

Raph Koster wrote an interesting post on the connection between games and the ludic fallacy as discussed in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestselling book The Black Swan. For those unfamiliar with the book, a black swan is an unpredictable but highly impactful event. Raph ends his post with a question:

"Rather than just bemoan this, I'll instead issue the challenge: what is the fun game that features black swans, phase transitions, and the catastrophic 100-year flood? How do you sculpt a system that does this without chasing away the newbies?"

This is an interesting question, and one which has a simple answer if not constrained to electronic games: pen and paper roleplaying games. The presence of a human game master lends unpredictability, surprises, and ad hoc creativity that electronic games can't hope to match. However, even ignoring the human element, the mechanics of electronic RPGs have been straying ever further away from unpredictability in a misguided pursuit of balance. Since long before I had the Black Swan framework to hang it upon, I have been thinking about the role of randomness in roleplaying games.

Roleplaying games typically draw on randomness for two different major functions. The first is in their action resolution mechanics. The second is in their content generation systems. Both of these got their start in the earliest pen and paper roleplaying games. The earliest electronic RPGs, existing primarily to recreate the tabletop experience, inherited both of these random elements. As electronic RPGs have diverged from their pen and paper roots, the role of randomness has steadily diminished. The results of this process are manifested most clearly in today's MMORPGs and JRPGs. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, even within the early pen and paper tradition, randomness has been afforded varying degrees of importance.

Let us begin by comparing the combat resolution systems of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Rolemaster. In AD&D a typical orc has 1d8 hit points and an armor class of 6. A first level fighter with no bonuses will hit an armor class of 6 with a roll of 14 or higher on 1d20(the standard die used for attack rolls in AD&D). At tenth level, the same fighter only needs to roll a 5 or higher to hit the orc. With a standard longsword, the fighter will do 1d8 hit points of damage to the orc if his attack succeeds. So, the first level fighter will hit the orc 35% of the time and it will take anywhere from one to eight successful blows to kill the orc. According to my calculations, the chance the fighter will kill the orc with his first swing is just under twenty percent(0.35 * 0.5625). However, if the fighter had a strength of 18/00(the max a human fighter can have naturally), he would receive a +3 bonus to hit and a +6 bonus to his damage roll. In this case, the fighter would have almost a fifty percent chance to kill the orc on his first attack. Clearly, there is a large random element to combat in AD&D. Bonuses from high ability scores and special abilities and equipment do reduce the relative importance of the random rolls, but these bonuses are usually fairly small. The main constraint to AD&D randomness is that the range of results is clearly defined. If a player's character has 10 hit points and an enemy is attacking him with a longsword, the player knows that his character can't be killed in one blow unless the opponent has some damage bonuses from strength, magic, etc.

In Rolemaster, however, things aren't quite so simple. The attack roll in Rolemaster is an open-ended d100. Normally, results range from 1-100, but on a natural/unmodified roll of 96-100 another d100 roll is made and added to the result of the first roll. This second roll is open-ended as well, so a natural 96-100 will result in a third roll, and so on, ad infinitum. The upper bound of an attack roll in Rolemaster is infinity. Unlike AD&D, the attack roll determines both whether a hit occurred and how much damage was inflicted, with one exception. The final attack roll result, plus the attacker's offensive bonus and minus the defender's defensive bonus, is indexed on a chart for the weapon being used and cross-referenced against the defender's armor type. The result is a number indicating the amount of damage inflicted and possibly a letter indicating a critical hit. Most combat deaths in Rolemaster are either direct or indirect results of critical hits; combatants tend to die in sudden and dramatic fashion and not as much through attrition. There are five degrees of critical hits, A through E, with E being the deadliest. When a critical is indicated, a separate d100 roll is made on the appropriate critical chart. Crticals can result in broken bones, bleeding, blindness, loss of consciousness, and even gruesome death. Even an A critical can kill on a natural roll of 100. Combine the lethality of critical hits with the fact that even the best armor usually can't reduce the probability of a critical hit to zero, and you have a system where any blow can kill. The genius of Rolemaster is that it allows players to manage risk by using any portion of their offensive bonus as a defensive bonus instead. It is rare for players to take a purely offensive stance unless their opponent is stunned.

Now let us draw a comparison between these older pen and paper mechanics and a modern console RPG, Final Fantasy 12. The damage equation for wielding a spear is:

DMG = [ATK x RANDOM(1~1.125) - DEF] x [1 + STR x (Lv+STR)/256]

Notice that the random element ranges from 1.0 to 1.125. Vaan at 50th level, wielding the best weapon in the game(ATK 150) against an enemy with a DEF of 50 yields:

DMG = [150 x RANDOM(1~1.125) - 50] x [1 + 50 x (50+50)/256]

The end result is damage ranging from 2053 to 2438, a fairly narrow range compared to the pen and paper systems. Also notice that successful attacks are the default. Instead, certain equipment like shields provide a chance block an enemy's attack. There is also a small chance to score a critical hit, which results in double damage. As you can clearly see, combat resolution in Final Fantasy 12 is much less random than even AD&D.

To see for yourself how much things have changed since the early days of roleplaying, just compare the combat of a grind heavy MMORPG with the commercial MUD Gemstone IV. Gemstone IV's game mechanics are derived from Rolemaster(in fact, earlier versions of the game licensed the Rolemaster rules and the Shadow World setting). You will not hear Gemstone players using terms like DPS(damage per second) when discussing combat strategy. You often hear complaints from MMORPG players concerning the grind necessary to gain levels, but in fact every MMORPG battle is a microcosm of the level grind. This is especially true of the large raid bosses. You can find a very brief excerpt of a Gemstone IV battle here. I was caught in an invasion of high level plant creatures into my low-level hunting ground and killed. Another player who attempted to rescue me was killed as well. The point of this comparison is that predictability isn't necessarily more fun because it is "balanced", sometimes it is just boring. And if it would be boring in a pen and paper game, then fundamentally, it is probably still boring electronically. It is just dressed up in a such a way that people put up with it.

But even the relatively unpredictable and complex combat mechanics of Rolemaster fall short of the conditions needed for Taleb's black swans. Even without knowing all the bonuses involved, the player can roughly estimate the risks. Looking at the attack charts, the player can see what results are needed to generate critical hits. With transparent mechanics, black swans are by definition impossible because the possibilities are known beforehand. With regard to task resolution mechanics, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is the generation of game content which can really benefit from black swans -- like the plant invasion which killed my character in Gemstone IV -- and this shall be the topic of my next post in the series.

L/N Review: Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge is a unique flower, a first person parkour game which is both innovative and retrograde. The game, like its Eurasian protagonist Faith, is fearless, unafraid to strive for realism and unafraid to admit, when all is said and done, that it is just a video game.

First, the innovation. Games which do new things mechanically are usually at least interesting. Generally speaking, unique mechanics either indicate the designers' willingness to rethink the appropriateness of accepted methods in realizing their game's concept or a concept that is so unique that there are no standard practices. It is often the first scenario which really demonstrates a team's commitment to innovation. Sometimes it is harder to trail blaze when a good road is already in place. The Mirror's Edge team deserves a lot of credit for building a system unique to their game. It would have been easy to create a parkour game based around canned animations and quick timer events, but they didn't. Instead they crafted a unique first person adventure, a platformer in a first person shooter's clothing. They also took the unorthodox approach of condensing a multitude of functions into two non-face buttons. With just three buttons the player can perform a complex array of free running maneuvers, without having anything handed to him and without ever being confused about which context sensitive action a button press will perform.

The level design, at first blush, is linear and doesn't allow for exploration of alternate routes. This is a novice mistake, however, due to the new player's preconceptions and poor understanding of the game's objectives and mechanics. The construction of the levels is actually one of the better realized aspects of the game. Just like in real life, it takes experience to understand the possibilities in parkour. The types of hidden routes available to Faith are of a much subtler nature. These are tricks that primarily serve to save time and maintain flow, not bypass large sections of the route. Their existence will quickly become apparent to anyone who spends a little time in the time trial mode racing against the ghosts of more experienced players. Mirror's Edge trains the player to see the game space in much the same way as traceurs learn to view the mundane landscapes of urban life. In Mirror's Edge an office building looks like an office building, bland on the surface but budding with possibilities for a runner as gifted as Faith. It is up to the player to recognize these possibilities.

The realistic approach to level design sometimes results in a lack of signposting in the environments, an absence of clear pathways and direction for the player. This is alleviated somewhat by 'runner vision', which is an optional system which colors certain key objects a bright red to aid in navigation. It is also possible to point Faith in the direction of the goal by pressing the O button. Unfortunately, both of these methods are a little lacking in execution. Even with them there are situations where the path forward is far from clear. While this can sometimes frustrate, especially when pursued by enemies, it is consistent with the game's goal of teaching the player to think quickly.

None of this would work if Mirror's Edge didn't also break new ground in portraying movement from a first person perspective. Mirror's Edge is a game requiring skill and expert timing and so the user feedback has to be informative enough to allow for precise judgements of position, momentum, distance, and angle. The game succeeds through a combination of visual and aural clues: the sound of footsteps and breathing to indicate speed, the bounce of the first person camera, the position and movement of Faith's appendages on screen, and so on. The game conveys everything the player needs to know through its first person perspective.

For a game as innovative as Mirror's Edge, it is also surprisingly retro. Mirror's Edge is a game that requires the player to master its mechanics, and in order to demand mastery it mustn't be afraid to punish poor play. In other words, Mirror's Edge is hard. The portions of the game where Faith is confronted by enemies are particularly challenging. Faith is fairly clumsy with weapons and can only absorb a small amount of damage. Her best chance against any enemy is to disarm him as quickly as possible(utilizing proper button press timing in the closest thing the game has to a quick timer event). Once disarmed, Faith will immobilize the enemy and can use his gun until the clip runs dry. The shooting controls, however, are a bit clunky and emphasize that gunplay isn't Faith's strong suit. In fact, if the player utilizes a little lateral thinking and attempts to avoid direct confrontation as much as possible -- the game constantly preaches avoidance -- the confrontations with the police will be much easier. Unfortunately, players who stubbornly attempt the same approach over and over are likely to do so dozens of times before finding success in some of the more challenging set pieces. Luckily, checkpoints are spaced frequently enough that the player isn't punished for experimenting with alternate strategies, but it isn't always obvious when the player is trying to do something the hard way either.

The story mode, although challenging, is quite short. The plot is forgettable, but the characters and environments are well done. Faith is an intriguing character with a great deal of aesthetic appeal, especially compared to the typically over feminized video game heroine. Plot development, when done in the form of in-game, first person sequences is executed brilliantly. But for some reason the developers chose to break the first person immersion into Faith's character by including poorly done animated sequences between chapters. These sequences are nothing more than a lazy approach to plot development. The story mode would have been greatly enhanced if the developers could have found a way to present the entire story from Faith's perspective.

Successive replays and speedruns of individual story chapters are worthwhile endeavors, but the time trials are where the game's longevity is truly found. Mirror's Edge is a game centered around its mechanics and level design and it is the time trial mode which brings these elements to a laser sharp focus. Dispensing with the sometimes frustrating combat elements present in the story chapters also plays to the game's strengths. The presence of online leaderboards and the ability to race the ghosts of other players' successful runs makes Mirror's Edge one of the best racing games ever made. The ghosts are indispensable for quickly learning many of the game's advanced techniques as well.

Aesthetically, the game has a clean and unique look. Like any good graphic work, Mirror's Edge is immediately recognizable. The music is also excellent, especially the title track "Still Alive". The only real blemish is Faith's voice actress. She isn't terrible, but she's certainly not strong and unique enough for the character.

Mirror's Edge is a triumph of both skill-based -- almost arcadeish -- game design and simulationist immersion. It applies retro gaming sensibilities to a first person parkour simulation and succeeds, both as a game and as an immersive experience.


Mirror's Edge(PS3) rolls a

for Ludology

and a

for Narratology


For an explanation of my L/N scoring system, read my posts on the theory and the implementation.

Mahjong in Yakuza 2

English speaking mahjong fans might be interested to know that Yakuza 2 has a pretty nice mahjong mini game. As far as I know, it is the only English version of mahjong out there on consoles. The mini game is standard 4-player mahjong with Japanese rules. There are several different tables -- with different skill levels -- that you can play at and it even includes a rule and scoring reference. You visit the mahjong parlor during the early parts of the game's main storyline, so you'll have to play for a few hours before you have access to it. There may be other mahjong parlors that you can play at later in the game. I'll keep you posted.

The Gaming Press: The Positives

Since I lashed out at the incompetence of the gaming press in my last post, I thought I should balance things out a bit with something nice to say. After all, duality is healthy.

The good news is that the situation is improving. Although hobbyist sites still tend to be the best overall, several mainstream sites like 1UP, Eurogamer, and Gamasutra are actually quite good. Not even sites like Kotaku are completely bad, they just aren't as consistently good as I think they should be. I believe some of the improvement is a result of hobbyists transitioning into professional jobs after gaining some recognition. Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield, who started insertcredit.com and so I assume falls into my hobbyist category, conducts the best interviews in the business. I'm sure there are others like him.

The biggest problem is that some of the most visible media sources are some of the worst. IGN really is terrible. Most of the print magazines aside from Edge are primarily PR mouthpieces, as are pretty much all TV programs about video games. The gaming press as a whole is probably at about the same level as your average small town newspaper. But there are some really bright lights here and there, and that gives me hope.

Misinformation

The general incompetence of the professional gaming press is kind of a pet peeve of mine. The competitive nature of capitalism suggests that the standards for entry into such a 'dream job' would be fairly high. Unfortunately, that is clearly not the case, as this Kotaku interview with Suda51 and Shinji Mikami once again demonstrates. The interviewer, who presumably was paid for this and claims to be a huge fan of both creators, makes several big mistakes which could easily have been remedied by a little research. The interviewer's lack of research is compounded by the fact that he presents the interview in a synopsis format, filtered through his personal misconceptions, instead of the typical transcript format that you usually expect. So, for the record, I'd like clarify the major mistakes.

The very first sentence demonstrates the lack of research:

It might seem weird that Japanese independent studio Grasshopper Manufacture is partnering up with US powerhouse publisher EA; but it seems weirder to me that wacky, artsy Suda 51 is pairing off with serious, horror-loving Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame.

In fact, Mikami and Suda51 collaborated in a similar fashion on 2005's Killer7. The two have also made public appearances together in Japan since Killer7, so a new collaboration doesn't seem surprising. Furthermore, Mikami's last game was the comedic action title God Hand, hardly a serious horror game. Further-furthermore, God Hand's soundtrack was composed primarily by Masafumi Takada of Grasshopper Manufacture.

What do Suda and Mikami think about the possibility of too many horror games? Not much, really. They like horror too – and more horror can only be good. Bear in mind though, that Suda is an action man first and foremost. So whatever we see from the dream team is going to be a blend of action horror; with Suda as the action and Mikami as the horror.

Let me borrow Suda51's own words from his(and Mikami's) recent interview with 1UP, probably conducted at the same press event: "I mean, Grasshopper has experience in creating action games, but Mikami is one of the top three action game creators in the world." The last three games Mikami directed are God Hand, Resident Evil 4, and P.N. 03, all action games and only one has horror elements. Mikami is more than the creator of Resident Evil.

I understand that the game industry is too big for one person to know it all, but preinterview research should be mandatory for any professional. Far too often it seems, gaming 'journalists' don't take their jobs seriously. The fact that this interviewer is a fan of these guys makes it even worse. I'm continually surprised when I, with a full-time job in a different industry, know more about the video game industry than the professionals.

Please, avoid this interview and read 1UP's instead. In fact, if the Kotaku interviewer had read 1UP's interview before writing his synopsis, he could have avoided a lot of errors.

L/N Review: Bioshock

"In real life, there is no such thing as a gradual descent from civilization to savagery. There is a crash -- and no recovery, only the long, drawn-out agony of chaos, helplessness and random death, on a mass scale."

-- "The Anti-Industrial Revolution", Ayn Rand

Bioshock is a video game about such a collapse, and for those familiar with the game, the irony of beginning my review with such a quote from Ayn Rand will surely not be lost. For Bioshock is about the collapse of a pseudo-Objectivist utopia called Rapture, established on the bottom of the sea by one Andrew Ryan(notice the similitude). The player is thrust headlong into the chaos -- for the crash is already well under way at the start of the game -- when his plane plunges into the sea near Rapture's aquatic entrance.

The opening segment of Bioshock does a fantastic job of introducing Rapture and it's ego maniacal founder. As the player is taken down into the city in a submersible, a loudspeaker drones:

I'm Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?

No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I
chose the impossible. I chose ... Rapture.

And indeed, Rapture is something magnificent. It is perhaps the best realized setting in video game history. The attention to detail lavished upon every aspect of the place is unparalleled, from the characters, to the music, to the numerous pieces of pop art and advertisements, to the general depiction of tragedy. Even better is the way that Rapture is presented to the player for the player to explore, but only if he so chooses. In Bioshock, the setting is the narrative, and it is up to the player to immerse himself in it. Yes, objectives are conveyed to the player through radio conversations, but hardly anything else is pushed at the player. The majority of what the player learns about Rapture will be through discovered voice diaries and the player's own keen eye for details.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Rapture is who lives there. Or perhaps more insightful is who doesn't live there. Rapture was created as a place where the greatest of mankind could strive without the artificial limits imposed by government and religion. But who does the player find there besides thugs, a stripper, some engineers necessary for Rapture's infrastructure, and a few brilliant but unstable scientists and artists? There were certainly some talented individuals that came to rapture -- most of which the player has to kill -- but a place like Rapture is destined to attract only the most ambitious or the naive. Many commenters have described Bioshock as a critique of Objectivism, but really it is a critique of all utopias and the human vices which cause them to fail.

Unfortunately, the narrative has very little impact on the actual gameplay. Unlike in Bioshock's spiritual ancestor System Shock, the player doesn't actually need to understand exactly what happened in Rapture. Nothing that the player learns can significantly impact his chances of success. Perhaps there are some clues to the locations of hidden stashes of useful items, but nothing significant stands out. This seems to be an intentional design goal, given the developer's stated ambition of creating a straightforward first person shooter that anyone can complete. It is clear that they didn't want anyone to ever get lost or become stuck in a certain area, and requiring players to pay attention to environmental clues just wouldn't be compatible with that goal. By default, there is even a smart little on-screen arrow which guides the player to each sequential objective. The decision to make the game completable by as wide an audience as possible was one that had consequences for almost every aspect of the game's design.

Bioshock also aims to be a game about morality. Bioshock's narrative themes deliver on this promise with its tales of human fallibility and the dangers of ideological extremism. Bioshock, however, doesn't really deliver on its key moral decision as hyped by numerous pre-release interviews. This decision, for those who weren't already aware, amounts to whether the player should harvest, and thus kill, or rescue the genetically engineered Little Sisters. It is here that the design goal of creating an easy to finish game conflicts with a narrative goal. Essentially, the developers needed to liberate the moral decision from gameplay consequences so that choosing the harder road of doing the right thing didn't actually make the game harder. The moral choice would carry so much more weight if the player were legitimately tempted by the prospect of the power to be gained from harvesting the Little Sisters. In fact, the hint of an unspecified reward for rescuing them pushes the curious player in the opposite direction.

Although lacking in puzzle solving and exploration, Bioshock is a well-executed shooter in terms of its basic mechanics. The weapons feel weighty and the action is suitably kinetic. The player also has quite a few options, including special powers called plasmids, a variety of weapons and ammo, passive status boosts in the form of gene tonics, a camera to "research" opponents with, and the ability to hack mechanical devices like security cameras, gun turrets, etc. Bioshock is not a game, however, which really requires the player to use more than a few techniques. Each weapon may be upgraded separately in such a way that they are all viable. With regard to plasmids, most major encounter areas are home to pools of water and conspicuous oil slicks so that players favoring either electricity or fire attacks are both accommodated. There are even ammo types which can serve as a substitute for plasmids if the player prefers gun play. So the player is free to use whatever methods he likes, but at the expense of ever feeling clever more than once or twice for making use of the obvious environmental aids.

The photography and hacking subgames are fraught with their own, more serious problems. In the case of photography, it just doesn't make any sense and doesn't lend itself to deductive reasoning. All players would probably like to easily bypass those security cameras, which can be done by taking enough pictures of them, but under what logic would it make sense for the player to even try this? The player is only told that researching enemies by taking their picture will increase the amount of damage done to them, which makes little enough sense as it is. The hacking minigame is even worse because it is harder to ignore, not very challenging, and incredibly tedious after the thirtieth or fortieth time.

The greatest flaw in Bioshock's gameplay, however, is the vita chambers, respawn points where the player instantly regenerates after dying. The player can immediately jump back into the action without having to reload a saved game. The consequences of failure are thus dramatically reduced, making ammunition the most important resource to conserve instead of the player's own life and limbs. Once the player realizes that firing a grenade and missing is a fate worse than death, kamikaze tactics ensue. The vita chambers also seriously inhibit the negative reinforcement necessary to push the player to improve his skill with the game. Will the player learn from mistakes that lead to his death? Will he explore the wealth of options available to him if it isn't necessary to achieve success?

Bioshock's lack of consequences for death also diminish the game's climactic battles with the Big Daddies. The leviathans take so much effort -- and ammunition -- to bring down that it is here that the player is really likely to use those kamikaze tactics. What should be a thrilling battle becomes a tedious war of attrition. One must wonder if the incredible resilience of the Big Daddies is a direct result of attempting to create an epic battle in an environment where death is no obstacle.

Bioshock is a wonderfully immersive experience. Everyone with an interest in games needs to experience Rapture, just to see what the medium is capable of in terms of writing, setting, and narrative. Unfortunately, after playing the game for 10+ hours, the player's experience will likely be marred by the developer's desire to ensure that everyone will finish the game. The end result is that one impediment to completion, difficulty, is merely replaced by another... boredom.

Bioshock rolls a

for Ludology

and a

for Narratology


For an explanation of my L/N scoring system, read my posts on the theory and the implementation.

On Tetris

A commenter to one of my earlier L/N posts asked what N-Score I would give Tetris. It is an interesting question and one I considered myself when I first began thinking about L/N.

To begin with, the N-Score would depend on the specific version of Tetris being reviewed. Any version of Tetris with a decent soundtrack and nice, crunchy sound effects would score somewhere in the average range of 9 to 12. A lack of, or low quality, sound effects or music could bring the N-Score below average while a truly excellent soundscape could pull it a little above average. Remember, I score games relative to their concept, so a complex narrative isn't a requirement for a puzzle game like Tetris. However, there are a number of things that a Tetris game could do to earn a significantly better than average N-Score.

For one, a dynamic soundtrack could do a lot to improve the "narrative experience" of Tetris. If the music matched the state of your current game, whether frantic and tense as you play on the knife's edge of defeat or triumphal and celebratory after landing a well set up tetris, you would certainly be more immersed in the game.

A Tetris game could also take a few cues from mahjong games and add opponents or antagonists that you play against. Instead of pieces dropping without explanation from the top of the screen, they could be positioned and dropped by an animated character. Tougher opponents would drop them faster and with different algorithms.

A Tetris game which did both of these could potentially earn a very high N-Score. So really, high N-Scores are not limited to certain narrative centric genres. Any game which maximizes the artistic and narrative potential of its concept can earn a high N-Score.

L/N Implementation Details

In an earlier post I described a dual metric for reviewing video games called the L/N system. That first post details both my philosophy of assigning quantitative scores and the qualities to be measured by each metric. Now it is finally time to discuss the specifics of my implementation of the L/N system. I say 'my implementation' because the L/N concept itself only applies to the what and doesn't extend to the how. Other reviewers are encouraged to develop their own implementations of the system.

A Problem of Scale

Probably the most common set of complaints I see regarding quantitative scores relate to the scale being used, which is almost always linear. Sometimes there is confusion in interpretation because the scale used is numerically linear but semantically nonlinear. For instance, the difference between a 6 and a 7 is greater or less than the difference between a 9 and a 10. Another common source of misinterpretation regards what constitutes an average score. Percentile scales and 10 point scales are particularly susceptible to this type of misinterpretation. Many readers will interpret a 7 or 70% as an average score even though it is well above the median score of 5 or 50%. The print magazine EGM recently moved from a 10 point scale to a letter grade scale to mitigate this sort of ambiguity. To avoid confusion, the scale used should be numerically and semantically consonant. The numerical mean should match the semantic mean and the relative numerical differences should be consistent with their semantic interpretation.

Another common complaint related to numerical scales is that the differences between scores often seem arbitrary. Percentile scales, for instance, are much more precise than any reviewer can justify. Having too much precision in a scale will undermine it to the point that readers will begin to question the accuracy as well. Linear scales compound the precision problem because the greatest works are often much, much more impressive than the average, but extending a linear scale far enough to adequately represent that may make the scale appear to be overly precise.

My Solution

So, I want to avoid linear scales and use a nonlinear one that gamers have an intuitive grasp of. It is also best if the scale is not easily confused with a linear one. My solution is to use a scale based on 3d6. Yep, the very same scale used to measure ability scores in Dungeons and Dragons(for those not in the know, D&D players generate their characters' ability scores by rolling three 6-side dice and summing the results). The biggest numerical advantage to using 3d6 is that it is distributed normally, i.e. the graph of possible values is a bell curve. The major non numerical advantage is that it is familiar, and even if you don't know what a normal distribution is, you probably realize that rolling an 18 is quite a bit harder than rolling a 17. The scores themselves will be represented visually by images of three dice. This serves to add another layer of information based on the specific dice chosen to represent the score. A 13 could be represented by 5-4-4 or 6-6-1, for example. A score of 6-6-1 would indicate potential greatness brought down by one or more serious flaws.



To provide a little more detail, the median score is 10.5. Since I'm obviously only using whole numbers, this means the average score ranges from 9 to 12. Scores within this range account for roughly 48% of the population. Less than half of one percent of the population would have an 18. Of course I am not going to assign scores with the sole aim of fitting a probability distribution, but the distribution does help define the relative difference between scores.

Guidelines For Assigning Scores

Now that I have defined the scale, I'd like to put forth a few guidelines I will follow when assigning scores. A number of questions have been raised by readers so far and hopefully these guidelines will paint a clearer picture of my scoring criteria.

First, context is important when scoring a game. The very highest scores are reserved for those games which are both incredibly well executed and groundbreaking in some way, and innovation is meaningless outside of the context of when the game was released. The original DOOM would score higher than the many clones which followed, even though some may have been just as well executed. Technological context is also important. Were a new 16 bit console game released today, its technology-related aspects would not be compared against current gen consoles.

In addition to historical and technological context, the concept behind the game is also important. Many reviewers already rate games relative to their genre, but I would like to be explicit in my belief that reviewers should take it a step further and make an effort to divine the developers' specific ideals and goals. I am a firm believer that not all games, not matter how excellent, will appeal to all players. If the very concept of a game and what it is trying to achieve doesn't appeal to a player, then they probably will not like it. A game should be judged in light of these factors. However, this doesn't mean that the concept itself is beyond reproach. Lack of ambition, for example, will certainly prevent achieving the highest scores.

For determining the N-Score, a useful guideline is to consider how interesting the game would be if you were watching someone else play it. This doesn't perfectly capture my concept of the N-Score, but it is still useful to consider because many elements measured by the N-Score can be appreciated by someone other than the player, such as music, art design, story, etc. There are some crucial differences though. Player immersion is something that the N-Score should be concerned with, but immersion is hard to measure if you aren't the one playing. The visual feedback provided by video games in response to user input can make the user feel like a hero in ways that movies and other passive media cannot. This type of immersion isn't captured by the L-Score because the visual feedback often has little or no impact on actually playing the game. It is a complex topic, but hopefully these examples clarify the concept of the N-Score.


And with that, I believe I have written more about my video game review philosophy and metrics than any mainstream gaming web site or print mag. Kind of a shame considering that I haven't written a single review and they've written thousands.

EDIT: Added a paragraph on 'concept' to the guidelines.

EDIT: Eurogamer actually has a fairly detailed description of their scoring policy. It doesn't address the same problems as my system, but at least it provides a detailed semantic description of their scale.

A Defense of Game Review Metrics

The subject of video game reviews turned out to be a hot topic last week. In addition to my post Reviewing and Scoring Video Games, there was a column on gamesetwatch by Simon Parkin and an interesting article at PopMatters by L.B. Jeffries. Jeffries makes an excellent point in distinguishing the majority of game reviews today from the type of real criticism that the industry could use a lot more of -- reviews are targeted towards consumers making purchasing decisions while criticism is targeted towards the game makers themselves. According to Jeffries, most reviews today don't go beyond "this game is/isn't fun" to explore the why's which could help game developers make better games. Parkin also has a few points to make concerning consumer oriented reviews. Parkin contrasts video game reviews with consumer electronics reviews, noting that an objective measure of quality isn't possible for games in the way that it is for consumer electronics. Instead, Parkin says, game review scores are really a measure of how well a game lives up to its pre-release hype, although consumers still view them as an objective measure of quality.

In reading the comments to these articles and others, I've gathered that many people agree with Parkin's point that attempts to objectively rate games are fundamentally flawed. While I agree that pure objectivity is impossible, there are a number of reasons why quantitative metrics are still worthwhile:

1) Quantitative metrics allow for searching and sorting. If a reader finds a critic he often agrees with, he can quickly find all games that the critic rated highly without having to skim the text of every review.

2) Quantitative metrics allow for algorithmic processing and analysis. Even though "wisdom of crowds" aggregating sites such as metacritic are often flawed, one shouldn't condemn the entire concept. Metacritic has a lot of problems, but most are related to the site's implementation. A critic's review scores could even be used to rate the critic himself. The potential applications are endless.

3) Multidimensional metrics provide a framework for the reviewer, hopefully improving consistency when assigning scores. Flaws in games are naturally more apparent when the game is judged from different perspectives, reducing the likelihood of a reviewer reflexively handing out a perfect score to a flawed game merely because it does some things better than any game which came before it.

Futhermore, enough people like review scores to prevent them from going away anytime soon, so we might as well spend a little time thinking about creating better metrics.

Out of all the critics of game review metrics, the group I most respect are those, like Jeffries, calling for more insightful criticism and less consumer oriented reviews. I also consider this to be a very real problem, but it doesn't entirely preclude the use of metrics. Certainly there are many focused pieces of criticism which wouldn't have anything to gain by applying a numerical rating, but more macroscopic pieces which analyze the entire work could still gain a lot from quantitative metrics. I, for one, plan on writing reviews that utilize both metrics and, hopefully, insight.

Reviewing and Scoring Video Games

I've been considering writing a few game reviews for my blog, which inevitably leads to thinking about scoring systems. Assigning a concrete score to any creatively produced work isn't something to take lightly. If a grade is assigned, it naturally creates an aura of objectivity and carries the weight of perceived authority. In many cases, the grade assigned carries more weight than the content of the review itself. The final score also opens the critic to criticism as well. If the critic desires the air of authority that concrete scores engender, he must take as much responsibility for the score assigned as he does for the content of his review.

It is for all these reasons that a critic should think carefully about any scoring system that he adopts. It is vital that the system used is consistent with the critic's philosophy of judging the medium in question. For me, the act of assigning a score of some sort is important because I believe that works of art CAN be judged objectively. I wouldn't bother with criticism at all if I didn't feel that this was the case. The challenge is to devise a scoring system which is informative enough to allow readers with their own varying predilections to make their own interpretations of quality without sacrificing the objectivity and finality of assigning a 'final' score. It is difficult to do this with a single, one dimensional metric.

In the old days game magazines would rate games on graphics, sound, difficulty, etc. Breaking the score down to this level of granularity is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, I might not be an expert in every category I might determine is necessary to judge. I feel much more qualified to judge a game's graphical quality than I do its sound design, for example. Second, it is important for a critic to take a stand on excellence, to make a final judgment. A myriad of small judgments certainly doesn't carry the same weight as one definitive score. And finally, the metrics used to describe one work's greatness may not paint an accurate picture of another.

Speaking of video games specifically, academics in the field of game studies can be roughly divided into two different camps, the narrativists and the ludologists(the wikipedia entry for ludology has a brief description of the differences for the uninitiated). I have yet to see a game scoring metric which synthesizes the current academic discussion on games. Therefore, I am proposing the use of a system which consists of two scores, one measuring the game's excellence from a ludological perspective and the other rating the narrative as it applies to the game. For lack of better terminology I will refer to these as the L-Score and N-Score, respectively. I am personally more of a ludologist, but that doesn't obviate the importance of narrative elements. After all, people play games for different reasons.

The L-Score is the score which is most closely related to the uniqueness of the medium. I have argued before that games are different from art because they aren't simply admired, they are also played. It is the interactive nature of games which ludologists emphasize, and so one can think of the L-Score as a metric for gameplay and game design. Mechanics, systems, and level design are the key components measured by the L-Score.

If the L-Score is a measure of a game's design, then the N-Score is a measure of its artistic achievement. The narrative, in this case, is defined rather broadly. It consists of the game's music, writing, visual style, sound design, overall setting, etc. All of these factors influence the player's involvement in the game and are therefore important even if they don't have much of a direct impact on the actual gameplay.

There may be some overlap between the components measured by the L-Score and the N-Score. For instance, the sound design in a first person shooter may provide an increased level of information and awareness to the perceptive player. Such a feature could be considered relevant to both the N-Score and the L-Score. Likewise, in an exploration intensive RPG interesting environments may be necessary to realize the goals of the game's design, making those environments important from a design perspective as well as an artistic one. Despite any overlap between what is being measured by the two metrics, each metric is still able to stand on its own.

All games are scored relative to what they are trying to achieve, with the very highest scores reserved for true innovation. The traits that make a good RPG are simply quite different from those of an action game, and so the game's concept must of course be in mind when considering the quality of the game's design. Similarly, when judging a game's narrative it would be silly to expect the same level of exposition from a shmup as from an RPG. The narrative of a shmup is less about plot and more about evoking a certain feeling through music and visual presentation. Genres which are more narratively focused will in some ways be judged to a higher standard. The fact that many story-focused RPGs require 40+ hours to finish places a huge burden on developers to create a consistently strong narrative and interesting setting. A five stage shmup should not be punished for having less content(unless more content would make for a better shmup.)

There has been a lot of debate recently concerning game review scores, with several print magazines altering or eliminating their review scoring system(EGM and Play, respectively.) I believe the main reason for dissatisfaction with most current game review metrics is that they no longer accurately reflect gamers' increasingly sophisticated view of the medium. Games are simply more complex than other forms of consumer entertainment, and as video game consumers continue to become more sophisticated they will demand more sophistication from video game critics. The solution is for video game critics to draw from the emerging field of game studies. My proposed L/N scoring system is the first step toward applying game studies research to video game review scores.

Solitary Pursuits

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the coincidental appearance of the article The Lone Adventures of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! on GameSetWatch recently. An excerpt:

But even those kids, who plodded through the game until their 9 PM curfew, had a leg up on the lowest caste of D & D players - the people who played by themselves. And I was one of them. How do you play Dungeons & Dragons by yourself? Well, you roll a character, give it a name, and you follow the module room by room, fighting, looting, fighting, looting, slapping on new gear, and fighting again. You don’t need a DM; you just need a long, slow night that needs killing.

And I was one of them as well! The entire article is so relevant to me it is almost surreal. Just days before I was describing to my wife how for me the typically communal D&D was an entirely solo venture. I related to her how I'm sure there must be a lot of other dorks out there who did the same, but not really caring for the social aspects, must have existed in their own isolated bastions of geekery. The article goes on to discuss the various game books designed for solo play, in particular Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series. Of course, that series is one of my favorites.

The really coincidental part is that the weekend before this article appeared, I committed myself to replaying the old Fighting Fantasy classic of yore, Deathtrap Dungeon. And here today, on this very blog, are the fruits of my labor: