Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

Video Game Violence

Gaming

The Senate is having a hearing on Video Game Violence, and here you can read the statements given in testamony.

The first statement is by Steve Strickland, a minister whose brother was one of three police officers killed by a teenage boy. The boy took one officer’s gun, shot him, then executed the other two officers. Of course, Jack Thompson, lawyer for the persecution of game designers, has convinced this man that this teenager would never have hurt anyone if it hadn’t been for playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I’ve got a brother who has played this game. He’s played it alot. The entire thing through, every mini-game, several times over. My brother has never shot anyone. Nor has he stolen cars, raped women, blown up buildings or anything else depicted in the game. In fact, I’d say the game has had no effect on my brother at all. He is the same easy going happy guy he has always been. Perhaps he’s just waiting for the right moment to explode.

The next statement comes from Elizabeth Carll, chair of a department of the AMA that believes that violence on TV makes people violent. So of course, they also believe that violent video games make people violent. The AMA has released this document as a call for what must be done to protect our kids. One of the bullet points of her statement I really enjoyed:

Encourage the entertainment industry to link violent behaviors with negative social consequences. Showing violence without realistic consequences teaches children that violence is an effective means of resolving conflict. Whereas, seeing pain and suffering as a consequence can inhibit aggressive behavior.

The emphasis is mine, because, well, perhaps kids shouldn’t watch the news or read history books either. Violence (war) has been an effective means of resolving conflict for a very long time.

Third we’ve got a statement from another psychologist, Dmitri Williams, who says the smartest thing so far: We don’t know. Internet media and gaming on the level we are talking about is a relatively new area. There are no 30 year studies because violent video games haven’t been mainstream for 30 years yet. As he points out, most of these studies are 10 minute and 30 minute studies, and legislators trying to pass game laws ignore the longer, more in-depth studies, like his own one month test because they show that nothing is conclusive. Also games of huge disparity are often tested together. One such study used sessions of playing Wolfenstein 3D with sessions of playing Myst. The problem is that its not just a case of one game being violent and the other is non-violent, but one game is a fast paced shooter while the other is a plodding puzzle solver.

Next, David Bickham comes in and basically says that the problem isn’t violent video games, but prolonged exposure to violence being rewarded. You know, I can’t say he’s wrong, but as I said a couple of paragraphs above, you can’t limit that to just video games and media. After watching our own government trounce people’s basic freedoms and fight a few wars, the idea that might makes right becomes pretty prevalent through just watching or reading the news. He also says that younger kids are more susceptable to this exposure and what amounts to a desensatization to violence, and again I can’t disagree. But I don’t think legislation is where this needs to be address unless we are going to legislate parents being better parents. Yep, 8 year olds playing Grand Theft Auto might end up with a warped sense of reality and violence, but what parent in their right mind allows their 8 year old to play GTA? And the funny thing is, even though he’s arguing for the wrong side, he agrees with me:

As caretakers of the next generation, we have a responsibility to provide children with a safe environment in which to grow, develop, and learn. As a society, we have decided that we should understand and control the quality and safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat. Research has shown that the media children use have real effects on their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. In the Information Age, media must be understood as a powerful, nearly universal environmental health influence. We ensure the safety of what we feed children’s bodies, we owe it to their future and to the future of our society to ensure the safety of what we feed their minds.

The only difference is that he’s fighting for more laws, more organizations, more government, while I’d prefer parents just pay attention to their kids.

Then we come to Jeff Johnson of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Basically all I have to say about him is that he’s trying to force stores to be penalized for parents not being good parents. Who lets their kids rent or buy games on their own? If you, as a parent, don’t at least look into it before they do it, you are a bad parent. Get better, please.

Now we come to Paul Smith who says, with lots of legal references, that games fall under the same first ammendment protection as books, film and TV. Did you know its not illegal to sell a ticket to an R rated film to an 8 year old? The movie theater may refuse to do it, but there is no law. The MPAA ratings are a suggested guideline. The ESRB already has in place a much better rating system than the MPAA so that parents can make informed decisions about what to buy for their kids. In short: If you don’t want your kids playing violent games, then don’t let your kids play them.

The last statement, from Kevin Saunders, kind of bores the hell out of me. He’s just reviewing the reasons behind various court decisions, and in the end says that even though they keep losing the battles to restrict game, they will keep on fighting because the Supreme Court hasn’t told them “no” yet. One of the most important statements made is:

Judge Kennelly also expressed concern over the size of the community of those studying the issue and the relationships among the scientists. He noted that, of the seventeen research articles relied on by the Illinois General Assembly, fourteen were authored or co-authored by Professor Craig Anderson, one by a colleague of Professor Anderson, and two by a scientist who relied on Professor Anderson’s research in designing his own studies. This concern might be eased by recognizing that the articles all survived peer review, but the concern might simply transfer to the peer review process and the small community from which referees might be drawn. It should, however, be noted that Professors Anderson’s and Bushman’s meta-analysis of the research in the field included studies by a significant number of scientists unaffiliated with Professor Anderson. See Craig A. Anderson & Brad J. Bushman, Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Effect, Physiological Arousal and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic View of the Scientific Literature, 12 Psychol. Sci. 353 (2001): Craig A. Anderson, An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games, 27 J. Of Adolescence 113 (2004). While these concerns of the court do not even currently seem valid, the continuing development of this area of scholarship and the attention paid by an increased number of scientists should eventually overcome the perceived shortcoming.

While he takes the stance that the court shouldn’t be worried by the lack of variety in sources for study, its important that he mentions it because this is the real problem. Out of 17 studies used by the people trying to pass a game restricting law 14 of them were written by the same guy, and the other three were a friend of his and two people who used his research for the bulk of their work. I think the effect of games on kids should most definately be studied, but right now there just isn’t enough data from which to draw anything close to concrete that would justify the legislation of games exceeding that which already doesn’t exist for other forms of media.

Anyway, in case you haven’t guess yet, I’m against legislating access to video games. Frankly, our society fosters a lifestyle in which neither parent is encouraged to stay home with the children. Raising children is the single more important thing we as a people can do, and yet “homemaker” is a derrided job title. If the US government really want to have an impact on protecting children, institute a new tax write off: If one of your dependants is classified as a homemaker for your other dependants, you get an extra bonus deduction. Reward people for being better parents and they’ll desire to be better parents.

The Journal

Gaming

So, I am back to playing WoW a little more consistantly, or at least I hope that I am. For the time being, I will be playing two characters. Ishiro, a human priest on the Durotan server, is currently level 57. With him I mostly play battlegrounds and run quests with Lorilai, Jodi’s paladin. And then there is Ishiro, an undead warlock on the Eitrigg server, who is level 26. My plan there is to level him up and do battlegrounds and run quests with Lochie, Jodi’s warlock.

Essentially, I like battlegrounds and I hate raiding. A brief sojourn back into first person shooters (thanks HL2!) reminded me that most games are relatively boring once you learn the tricks of the game engine, but when you come up against another human being things can get interesting. My only grip with PvP in the context of MMORPGs is the disparity between casters and melees. In a traditional FPS everyone is on the same footing. In RPGs melees can run and jump and strafe and hop around the world like a jackrabbit on crack, but casters mostly have to stand still and pray they can not get interrupted and keep the target within the field of vision. It might be okay if casters we much more powerful, but as a priest, I’ve been killed enough times with a single weapon swing or in a matter of seconds to know that it just isn’t true. But I’m learning to deal with it.

That said, from here on out, everything posted in this category will be concerning what I’ve managed to do in game for either the Alliance or the Horde.

Death Penalties

Gaming

One thing every game has to deal with somewhere in its design is the penalty for losing. Some games have opted to have none, but in my opinion this leads to the “lemming effect” where player has absolutely no fear of losing and will repeatedly slam into a brick wall until the wall gives in. Other games have chosen to allow methods for the reduction of penalties, like clones, insurance, returning to your body, praying at your death site, etc… the list goes on forever.

Long ago, EverQuest had a very stiff penalty, depending on your level at the time, you would lose experience equal to ten to twenty percent of your level. On some levels, that was hard to earn back. To that end, players avoided death, and dying made them angry. Later, Sony reduced the death penalty enough that the last few groups I was in before I quit didn’t really seem to care about death at all. And of course, experience loss deaths mean very little when you are level capped and have a good buffer.

Other games, like City of Heroes, maintained the exp loss death, but also allowed you to continue forward progress, and you could never lose a level. You earn “debt”, and while you had it fifty percent of your experience went to pay it off and the other fifty percent went toward your next level. Sort of good, but it lead to people not minding defeat, which in a superhero game leads to a little more heroism (but a lot more stupidity). Of course, with CoH having a penalty actually helped because it forced you to level slowed, gain more influence (money), and be able to keep up to date on your power enhancements (store bought).

The one thing all of the games I’ve played have in common, and the thing I would like to see change, is they all have one kind of defeat. Just one. You die, you lose exp. You fall, you get debt. You are killed, you drop an item (Asheron’s Call). You lose, your equipment is damaged (World of Warcraft).

Why no variety?

What I’d love to see in games is multiple layers of defeat. Why must lose of hitpoints always equal death? Why must monsters you fight be relentless until they kill you? When a mugger attacks me in the city, why not have him beat me into unconsciousness, steal some money and then run away? If I enter hostile territory, why can’t they beat me down, then if they defeat the entire party, drag us to the edge of their land and leave us for dead? Why can’t I be disarmed, paralyzed, and laughed at?

I don’t see a reason for having so few options except that the more options you have, the more code it requires. Building a bigger box.

They ARE out to get you!

Gaming

One big topic of discussion when it comes to any MMO game is its “death penalty”. Mostly this is because people want to know, up front, what’s going to happen when they are too stupid to live, but the other side of this is that most MMOs are specifically designed to kill you.

Its the one thing I find lacking in online games as oppose to the pen and paper games I enjoy with my friends. Yeah, Brian is actually out to kill us too, but he’s generally nicer about it so that at least in part its our own damn fault. But in online games, there are so many encounters that get designed to be killers, to the point where playing a game is more of an exercise in triage than an adventure. You can hear it in the uber guilds as they lay out their tactics in which they are actually calculating losses. “When the first tank goes down…” Not IF the tank goes down, WHEN.

To a degree, this is acceptable, when you are leading an army against a god, you should have some fatalities, but this attitude leaks over into groups as well, and sometimes you can even see that it leaks into the developers as they design expansions. Of course, the developers may just be reacting to player tactics.

But, is introducing permanent death and encouraging player fear of death the answer?

Well, yes. But not alone. The best thing about real life is that not everything kills you, even muggers. Sometimes you just get hurt, incapacitated and left alone. This should happen more in games. Why is everything not only out to get me, but wants to kill me and lick my bones clean? Why can’t some of them be happy with knocking me unconsious, stealing my money and leaving me pantsless in the woods?

I think designers really need to get more creative with defeat. Death shouldn’t be the only answer.

Survey: Question Number Three

Gaming

In most MMO games today, your character has lots of hit points and you get hit a few dozen times before you go down. In pen & paper systems, your character tends to have lower hit points and depends largely on misses, blocking and resists to survive; getting hit a couple or three times can put you in the dirt. So the question is, which system would you prefer to play in, one where you have hundreds or thousands of hit points and get hit for small amounts often and large amounts infrequently, or one where you have dozens of hit points and get missed mostly and hits are more critical in nature?

To a degree, playing in a large number system is more… calming. I get hit and I shrug it off. I have 5,000 hit points and the monster I’m fighting only hits for 50, so I can get hit 100 times before I fall. Mathematically, it allows for a steady, normalized, progression of damage that leads to character death. With the occasional spike of spell damage to keep you on your toes. However, like other things, I’m a bit tired of this system because it is so prevalent.

The other method is more tense. Miss, miss, miss, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, block, HIT! Crap! I just lost half my hit points! Miss, miss, block, miss, block, block, dodge, miss, miss, dodge, HIT! Almost dead! Not gonna make it! Block, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, miss, miss, miss, dodge, block, enemy falls over dead. Whew! I made it!

I don’t know. It just seems to me that if it worked that second way, I’d care more, I’d be less tempted to do some AFK fighting. What do you think?

Combat Skills

Gaming

One thing I feel is really lacking in pretty much all MMORPGs is actual player skill. With their simplistic auto-attack or even button/click feat based scenarios there is very little room for the player to really control how good their character is at fighting. Even in games like City of Heroes where there isn’t really an auto-attack, your skill is hamstrung by the limitations of the game mechanics, which in CoH is the recharge time and choice/placement of expansion slots.

FPS games are all about skill. Well, except when the game allows scripting/macroing. People who used the rocket-jump scripts in Quake were cheaters in my book, people who did it without a script were talented. But that aside, every player runs the same speed and has access to the same weapons, and what separates the players is how well they use the guns and know the maps.

However, in making combat more skill based, I don’t want to lose the players who actually prefer auto-attack. So consider this…

The default configuration is auto-attack. You equip a sword and run up to the monster and hit attack. Your weapon will do average damage, perhaps with a random chance to score a critical hit and do double damage. This model is enough to play the game. You won’t be the best in the world, but you will do alright. Then, on an option screen, you are able to select several levels of skill based control. For example, you can choose the “fighting style” method which presents your character with a list of pre-set sword grip and fighting styles. Each style has advantages and disadvantages, base-lined on the auto-attack, and you select them and use them. Then on the furthest end of the scale is “complete control” where your joystick controls your sword arm and your keyboard moves your feet, you gain the ability to move the sword in whatever way you choose to hamstring opponents or stab at the eyes, but you also have your damage affected by your movement because “strafing” around a target you’ll have much less power than if you plant your feet and put your whole body into the swing.

It would obviously take alot of effort to work out all the details, but the gist is that you allow the player to decide how much skill they want to use in the game. The less skill they use, the move “average” their character is; the more skill, the more chances for heroics.

Personal Space in Games

Gaming

In MMORPGs, one of the decisions that gets made in their design is whether or not to give player characters personal space, or as I usually call it a “bounding box”.

EverQuest had a bounding box. Two people could not pass directly through one another. This caused issues when popular NPCs, like bankers, would get mobbed by players resulting in people who could not get close enough to interact. And sometimes this caused huge uproars when it came to doorways and other tight spaces. It was not uncommon to see an ogre in the Plane of Knowledge sitting in the bank doorway being an ass and demanding to be paid to move. It had other uses too, on my server there was at least one incident of using an orge to block a passage way into raid content, denying competition to a second group to a raced spawn.

Of course, going with no bounding box at all can cause just as much issue. In World of Warcraft players have no personal space. This is great when it comes to the auction house because there will commonly be fifty people trying to crowd around the one NPC. The drawback comes in PvP combat. A spell caster has to keep his target in his field of view to cast, so in order to interrupt casting all a melee player needs to do is run right up, step through the caster, then step back. In about a second the target goes from being in front, to 180 degrees behind, back to front again. Even with good reflexes and high speed mouse control, its very hard not to lose the spell cast, and for a melee player with a slow two handed weapon he won’t even miss a swing while he two-steps the caster’s blast into interruption.

What I would suggest is that instead of strictly making the bounding box a property of the character object, also make it modifiable by the surroundings. Make it so that in a defined area, around an NPC or doorways to buildings or narrow hallways in dungeons, the player becomes “intangible” and other players can pass right through them, and while not in those areas, players have a seeming mass and cannot be stepped through.

And with this, I kick off my section “The Game That Never Was“, which is going to be a collection of ideas that I have about what would make the perfect MMORPG.

Survey: Question Number Two

Gaming

Following the last question on stat systems: Would you prefer to play in a game where all the numbers are shown to you, or one where the numbers are hidden and values have to be inferred through experience, or some middle ground mix of numbers and inferences?

Several games in their Alphas or early Beta stages have toyed with removing numbers. If I remember correctly, EverQuest did this. You either “miss”ed or “hit” when fighting, and there are life bars, and there are descriptions for stats like “strong as an ox” or “slightly slow and dim-witted”. But in the end, and I believe usually from player/tester pressure, they put the numbers back in so that we can see that we hit for 8 points of damage and that we have 73 hit points remaining and that our strength is 18 and our intelligence is 9.

I’ve often thought I’d enjoy playing a game without the numbers, even though I’ve not played one like that yet outside the pen & paper gaming group on Saturdays. Mostly, its just because I’ve come to dislike the culture of numbers in games, where people judge you on your stats instead of your ability to play. It’s something I would like to try.

How about you? What system would you prefer?

Survey: Question Number One

Gaming

Would you rather play an MMORPG with no statistics caps and items overflowing with bonuses or one with finite, even small, caps and item bonuses being rare?

It is actually an important question to consider, both as a player and a designer. First, let’s tackle the player side…

As a player of the first scenario, your character has stats (strength, intellect, stamina, etc.) that start low and have no limit. As you progress through the game you’ll casually pick up items that boost stats, giving you more strength or stamina or intellect or whatever, or a combination subset of them, or all your stats. Then as you reach the higher levels of the game, the items become litered with stat bonuses, and your character sheet is lined with three digit numbers. This is actually the model most games on the market currently present to players. At level 5 you’ll get a “Shard Sword of Quickness” that does decent damage and adds a small bonus to your dexterity. By level 60 you’re drooling for “Mangar’s Mystical Maul of Mighty Mashing” that practically kills anything under level 40 in a single blow, adds more than 40 points to every stat, makes your hands glow blue, and occasionally explodes fire on your target for more damage.

In the second scenario, we’ll take the age-old Dungeons & Dragons model. Stat cap of 25, and anything over 18 is rare and exceptional. Your fighter is a tough guy with a 17 strength, and throughout most of his life from levels 1 to 60 he uses items of varying quality, Rusty Blades to Polished Rapiers to Adamantine Swords of Supreme Quality, each one better than the last, doing more damage, needing less repair, and other more esoteric qualities like the graphics. Then, at level 60, you and a group of friends fell a dark lord in a castle and you are rewarded with a Blade of Might that gives you a two point bonus to your strength when you wield it, pushing your strength to 19.

From the design standpoint… Scenario one leads to the marginalization of statistics. If you are going to be handing out stat bonuses like candy on Halloween, and characters are going to be allowed to climb from a starting point under 20 and finish up somewhere above 200 or 500 or wherever, individual point bonuses have to be tiny, almost meaningless, so that getting an item with 4 strength on it does very little, but getting one with 40 strength on it is noticable.

The second scenario, well, that can lead to disappointed players. Sure, going from a 17 strength to a 19 strength means the player goes from being a well toned human to a small giant when it comes to damage bonus and being able to kick down doors and lift open the lids of stone crypts, but that system, while possibly easier to manage and balance for gameplay, means that bonuses are extremely rare, and many players may never see one at all.

Personally, I’m actually sick to death of the dominant system on the market. I’d prefer to try a game with a more limited stat system where every point means something. So, what system do you prefer?

Double Fisted Gaming

Gaming

I hate playing First Person Shooter games on a console system. The step back from a keyboard and mouse set up to a console game controller is just too much for me. However, games for consoles have been getting better and better, and upgrading my computer over and over keeps getting more expensive. So I’ve been looking at the next generation consoles… So far, the XBox 360 seems like a good one, and I like the idea of online play which it excels at. But the Playstation 3 promises to be backwards compatible with all PS2 and PS1 games, which is something I miss on other systems. I currently own a GameCube, and I’d kill to play classic Super Mario Bros. if they’d let me. It wasn’t until I was really looking into the Nintendo Revolution that it hit me as to what I really want from a game system… Double Fisted Gaming.

I look at the Revolution controller, the new wand thing… and it sounds both neat and annoying. However, it also sounds like halfway to what I want. Imagine playing a shooter game, with the wand-like controller as a gun, and a second controller on your other hand to control movement. Not two thumbsticks like current games, but two completely separate controllers… like a keyboard and a mouse.

Now, I know game companies like the idea of people being able to sit in any position and hold the controller… but you know what? Screw ’em! I want a second controller “keypad” that I strap to my leg or something, or rest on a table and give it about a dozen or so keys, maybe even a scroll wheel (for weapon switching in FPS games). Take that and the Revolution wand and I’ve got me a “keyboard” and a gun in my hand. Hell yeah!

If you are a designer out there and want to make fansy controllers for game systems.. please, PLEASE, steal this idea!