Archive for July 16th, 2007
This is apparently true, and it isn’t good. A couple obsessed with some online video game almost let their kids starve to death: Police: Babies starved as parents gamed (MSNBC.com).
The article basically sticks to the facts and is fair. And the events are an argument in favor of at least recognizing that video game playing can be a problem behavior for some people. I’m still not in favor of labeling video games as clinically addictive, despite the article’s link to discussions on the subject.
No, video games are not the problem; it’s the people themselves (in this case the parents) who are the problem. Yes, more kids are abused by drug-using parents, and those cases are all too often completely ignored. Maybe ’cause we’re jaded. Maybe ’cause we’re scared of thuggish drug users but not nerdy gamers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend that no problems exist.
Most people who play video games use them very healthily. Most people who drink alcohol use it healthily, too.
So what to do?
What do the non-alcoholic friends of people with a problem do that genuinely helps? What do you do when your friends spend all their time and money at casinos?
What doesn’t work is calling the problem behavior a disease (it doesn’t help). Outlawing it doesn’t do any good either. And since I don’t have friends who have what I recognize as addictive or compulsive problem behaviors, I don’t really have any experience.
But what does work?
(Tangentially: I wonder if this is actually an argument for more voice chat in online games. I am not thrilled by voice chat in MMORPGs, ’cause I fear it will interfere with my ability to roleplay. But making the people you’re gaming with real and facilitating players actually getting to know one another may enable the same social support online that people get when they have healthy groups of real-life friends and coworkers.)
July 16th, 2007
Last year, Google hosted a cross-promotional alternate reality game (ARG) for the Da Vinci Code movie
. I played the game and quite enjoyed the various puzzles. I didn’t qualify as a finalist, though, at least in part because of an irritating scheduling conflict. In fact, the nature of the game and its popularity meant that only those dedicated fans with very flexible schedules really had a chance.
This year’s game is the Ultimate Search for Bourne, a tie-in with The Bourne Ultimatum. I liked the first two movies well enough. (Actually, come to think of it, I slept through part of the second, and I’m not sure I’ve ever got the plot straightened out.)
The game looks fun, too. As far as I can tell, you can’t really do anything today except look at the site and take a stab at understanding the gameplay. When the first real briefings becomes available, you should be able to use clues in it to find a place on a map where you can catch a glimpse of Jason Bourne through a surveillance camera. And I guess, if you choose the right camera (or cameras), you “win” for that day.
The prizes aren’t very important to me, though I can’t deny that I’d say no to an iPhone if someone decided to give me one just for playing a game.
What does matter to me is that there’s a chance this game will capture a little something of the spy genre, in an armchair sort of way. (Not real spying, of course.)
I can’t think of any truly great spy video games (Am I wrong? If so, please tell me. I’d love to try them out), but perhaps, if this game is a success, some daring and innovative game house could build on it to develop a sort of internet-based, global, massively-multiplayer version of “Assassin.” A top-notch game development crew could make this very, very fun.
EA ran Majestic. Supposedly, you would sign up and get phone calls, e-mails, and even faxes! And these would lead you to clues in a conspiracy game. It didn’t last, maybe because the price didn’t seem justified by the execution.
The Lost Experience did something similar. Unfortunately, it did it at a time when Lost basically sucked, so I didn’t pay much attention. Plus, the “game” wasn’t very fun and did require you to buy too much stuff, or much off other geeks on the internet who were willing to spend their money. So I didn’t participate.
Technology is better now, and we understand it better, too. Even if a game like the one I’m imagining would be heavily driven by advertising, it’d be fun. And if it weren’t—for example, if you had to buy a box in the game store just as you do with World of Warcraft and to pay a modest monthly fee—it just might become a success that would drawn the attention of people who don’t call themselves gamers.
What would make such a game work? A truly great ARG needs to use not just e-mail and phones, but the tools developed for multi-player FPS games and MMORPGs. A quick brainstorm turns up:
- A console website (or separately executed program, though that may eliminate some markeshare) as the single source of access
- Daily challenges (like the Google game) to find something online, succeed at a particular action goal, or achieve some other end; if there are real prizes, they could be tied to this
- Constantly available content, consisting mostly of the same sorts of things that make up the daily challenges, but tied to in-game rewards only (character advancement, revelation of plot, the chance to actually affect the ongoing plot, etc.)
- Action-based mini-games (building on FPS games, presumably)
- Puzzle-based mini-games with a spy feel to them (decoding messages, for example, or hacking a computer)
- The daily challenges add up to an ongoing narrative
- Rewards in the form of mini-episodes (three minutes?) of an ongoing spy drama tied to the game
- A strong community tool, to allow users to share stories
- Challenges unique to each player, so they can’t be “spoiled”
- The ability to group into a “cell” for team missions, where each participant must complete a certain challenge live, and all will be rewarded together
- Possibly ways to develop your character down different paths, so that, for instance, one cell member might disarm traps in the action mini-games while the other does the sharpshooting, while in appropriate puzzle games characters could have “clues” that make resolution of difficult, timed bits easier
- PVP in the form of competition with other players or cells on mutually exclusive goals, such that one cell might be trying to protect an ambassador’s life while the other is trying to assassinate her
- Possibly the ability to control a team of NPCs, at least in certain mini-games (like map-based games, where agent placement determines success)
- Possibly real prizes from sponsors (if the game is 1/10 as successful as something like WoW, daily giveaways of geeky, spy-like prizes from companies interested in the free advertising, branded with the game so that winners can boast about their success, might not actually ruin the game)
- An opportunity to delve into roleplaying while playing, with story-choices, text and voice chat, avatars, and so on
Okay, it’s all just a bunch of crazy ideas, at this point, poorly drafted and dumped on the page. But I think there’s real potential for a tremendously fun, successful game. Not long ago, I bemoaned the fact that all new games really seem to be new coats of paint on old games. A well-designed internet spy ARG—with daily challenges, demands that reach outside the game (like finding translations, locations, and so on)—could fit the bill.
In fact, I think after I hit “Publish,” I’ll draft an e-mail to an old friend of mine who’s a writer for several video game companies (some of which have spy themes), to see if what he thinks about the viability of this idea.
July 16th, 2007
Last weekend, I finally got to give the Game of Thrones board game a try. (I’m only just now getting to write about it because it’s been a darn busy week of utterly un-fun work.)
I played with my wife and another couple, so we had to play a four-player game. The game is specifically designed for five players, so this meant turning House Greyjoy (one of the competing sides) into a set of neutral forces. I suspect that the game is still not perfectly balanced, but with a game like this, that can be part of the fun. How well you do as a losing house can, for the right player, be even more interesting than winning as a house with an advantageous starting position.
Once we figured out the rules, the game ran very smoothly. Because (as is always the case) I was the only person who read the rules, we had at least one or two major rules questions every turn.
Because of these rules questions, everyone made major flubs every turn. For instance, one player gave support orders to her units thinking, for some reason, that they would let her move the units.
Most confusion centered around how controlling areas of water allowed a player to treat different land regions as adjacent. When I read the rules, I found I understood this feature quite easily, but either I explained it poorly or it isn’t as intuitive as I thought. I said, paraphrasing from the rulebook, “If you control an area of water, you can treat two landmasses as if they’re touching, as long as they border that area of water. And you can extend it, in theory, as far as you can control water areas.” Or something close.
But it didn’t stick. One player, twice, gave a ship marching orders because he wanted to move units to The Arbor, when it was his units on the mainland that needed the marching order.
I think part of the confusion is that the physical shape of the regions makes for some surprising connections by water. The connection between Widows Watch and Crackclaw Point via The Harrow Sea may be one of the most strategically important things for the Starks, but the Stark player in our game didn’t realize the connection existed until everything was almost over.
Despite the inequalities, the game played fairly well. Lannister didn’t do too well, but even she might have made a comeback if we’d finished the game. We only got to the end of turn Six, though, when my two-year-old daughter decided to wake up from her nap. The game does allow for comebacks, I think.
The random element—the order in which cards come up—is just heavy enough that a player could conceivably be victimized by a series of bad draws. But it’s light enough that this is very, very improbable. I wouldn’t consider removing the random element. I very much like the feel of uncertainty it brings, and if I want to play a pure strategy game, I’ll opt for chess, go, or dvonn.
We played without any alliances, backstabbing, or vendettas, because we were busy getting a feel for the rules. I wonder what it will be like once everyone really knows the rules . . .
In any case, the others weren’t too gung-ho to revisit the game when my daughter went to bed, so I didn’t get to try it again. I’ll be bringing it on my two-week vacation in August, though, and I have a feeling there are enough geeky adults that I’ll get to try it a bunch more times.
July 16th, 2007