Stock Ticker Classic - The last 10%

Stock Ticker Classic is my very first video board game and it won't be my last.  There's nothing ground-breaking or remarkable about it.  In fact, anyone with even moderate programming skills could easily implement their own version.  It took me about five days to get the beta running, and I've spent five months working on what has been called the last ten percent.

I took the phrase from a chapter in Developing Games in Java by David Brackeen, et al.  The book is about seven years old, and not especially helpful.  Check it out from the library, if you can, but I don't recommend buying it.  If I'd bothered to actually read the chapter, and not just glance over the table of contents, I probably would have learned that the last ten percent is the most tedious, but perhaps most important part of getting a game ready for market.  Stock Ticker Classic in its current form is totally playable and true to the original board game, but it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles people have come to expect in their games (and software in general).  If a game designer doesn't meet those expectations, no one but supportive friends and family members will give the game any attention. 

Bells and whistles can mean many different things.  Here, of course, I'm referring to visual and auditory feedback, but I'm also including game deployment in the mix.  It's the visual and auditory cues that are going to get people hooked.  I don't have any quantifiable evidence, but judging from the traffic on the Stock Ticker Classic site, I'd say you have about thirty seconds to grab a player's attention or he'll just bugger off.  As for deployment, I've already stressed its importance in a previous article... make it easy and give the user every assurance that the software is safe to run, which it usually is anyway when loaded as an applet in a browser. FYI, some of that JNLP stuff is kind of weird.  I'm not sure real-world users will appreciate its security benefits, especially when the whole installation procedure looks fishy in and of itself.

Finishing the last ten percent is an onerous task, indeed.  Right now I want nothing more to move on to a new project.  It's taken a lot of restraint to stay focused on what's currently on my plate.  Given my vague commercial aspirations, I suspect the discipline I've gained from this experience will pay off in the long run. 

Social gaming - repackaged RPGs?

Here's a post by Brenda Brathwaite, a professional game designer based in San Fransisco:

Some Forming Social Game Theories 

This is confirmation that the notion of social gaming is being made up as we go along.  This is not a bad thing, per se.  New phenomenon, be they cultural, technological, or whatever, emerge all the time.  People recognize something unique and then invent the vocabulary to describe it.  This is the natural order of things.  When it comes to social gaming, however, we have yet to establish if it is, in fact, something new.
 
The list of forming social game theories provided above was started on Twitter and then moved to the author's blog for safe keeping.  It is intriguing because it appears to be the product of real industry professionals, as opposed to amateur hacks like myself.  Several of the suggested theories fall into the category of interface design, and are thus not peculiar to the social gaming phenomenon.  The bulk of the theories, though, lend credence to the one recently postulated by myself: i.e., social games do not draw to any natural conclusion.
 
This broad theory is fleshed out quite nicely by Brathwaite and her colleagues.  Here are a couple of the more poignant observations quoted directly from her blog:

Players should:

1. Have short-term problems to solve (in a session) and long-term problems to solve (multiple sessions). Longer term problems/desires may be aspirational goals, collections or quests to complete.  
2. Feel like they have agency in the game. Through their direct action, something happens. Without them, it doesn’t happen. If you never plant crops, you never get results.
3. Feel good about posting something in their feed. They believe what they’re posting will help them and help their friends playing the game, too. 
4. Have clear dailies including friend grind, playspace grind and bonus progression, if applicable. What do I do everyday when I come back to the game? Do I know that I have finished what I needed to do? How do I know that I need to do it (and no, your last play session isn’t enough).

These four observations best complement the interminable nature of social gaming without encroaching upon or muddying the distinctive elements of what might be called traditional gaming.

So then, what's new about social gaming?  Still nothing that I can see.  Dungeons & Dragons, which has been played for decades offline, so to speak, may possess all those characteristics, as per the will of the dungeon master... well, all of the characteristics except for the feed-posting, which no one really likes anyway.  In any case, it doesn't take much effort to pair this characteristic with a loose analog (e.g., D&D dorks talking about D&D, much to the annoyance of everyone else riding the bus). 

Still, I remain optimistic that there is something new in social gaming worthy of interest.  Any suggestions as to what that elusive new element actually may be?

Pokemon - Deploy!

Number One Pokemon Trainer

Pokemon, evidently, still has a substantial fan base.  I never jumped on this particular fad because I was sixteen when they first appeared and was still too obsessed with the Ninja Turtles to be bothered with anything new.  According to Wikipedia, Pokemon, or "Pocket Monsters", is the Japanese version of "Trouser Snakes", a common Western game with which all sixteen year-olds are well acquainted.  It has now been fourteen years since the Pocket Monsters were unleashed on the world, and the sedentary six year-olds who spent all their allowances on playing cards have lived well past the expected middle age of that demographic. Interestingly, the crises of midlife have manifested themselves in home-brewed computer versions of this once wildly popular card game.

Let's play Pokemon, mon!

This recently came down the Facebook pipeline courtesy of one of those original Pokemon gangstas.  Given his enthusiasm for the project promoted on the site and my new-found interest in bridging physical gaming and video gaming, I thought I'd check it out.  What I found is a surprisingly professional looking site with two valuable Don't-do-want-Donny-Don't-does-type lessons in video game deployment.
 
Lesson #1: make your game easy to access
It's not that this so-called Pokemon Online Battle Sim is necessarily difficult to get a hold of, but it is 16.5 MB and hosted on a server somewhere in the European Union.  From where I'm sitting, that's a download that can take anywhere from three minutes to three hours, depending on traffic.

Lesson #2: I don't know you and I don't trust you
I immediately grew apprehensive when I discovered that the Pokemon game is only available as a downloadable, installable executable.  That's right, you actually have to download and install it.  If you don't understand my apprehension, I invite you to install the software yourself.  Be sure to let me know how it works out.  If you're a Mac user, better still... there's a version for you!  Macs can't get viruses, right?

My first foray into video board game design and distribution, though modest, taught me some interesting lessons about software deployment (world multi-player coming soon, FYI).  But, even being the amateur that I am, I would have thought the lessons listed above would be no-brainers.  The real shame is that I actually want to play the Pokemon game, but the reasons listed in Lesson #2 are more than enough incentive for me to run screaming in the opposite direction. 

What the heck is social gaming?

Last night, I stumbled across an article about something called social gaming.  The phrase strikes me as somewhat tautological, because game-playing is, quite often, a social activity.  It's kind of (but not quite) like when people say software program.  Software and program mean the same thing.  No one would ever say, "You've got to try this program program I downloaded", or, "This software software really makes filing my taxes easier".  Likewise, you'd never hear someone say, "Scrabble is my favourite social game".  The game itself is necessarily social.  And while it's true that the term social gaming doesn't really suffer the same redundancy as the term software program, the inherent social aspect of many gaming endeavours does make me question what the term is supposed to mean.

Certainly, there are categories of games that can be described as antisocial.  Single-player video games are an obvious example.  Also, solitaire is antisocial by definition, because if you needed two players, it would no longer be a solitary activity.  Social and antisocial gaming has been around since the invention of free time, so why the sudden need to make the distinction?  The most probable explanation stems from the advent of social networking, which, if understood in strictly human terms, is a definite tautology.  Networking would be impossible if people didn't come together to socialize.  In computer terms, however, social networking does describe a new phenomenon: the integration of computer networking into human relationships to create, maintain, and facilitate said relationships.

The advent of social networking may partly explain where the term social gaming came from, but it does nothing to justify its existence.  Once upon a time I had a high school teacher ask me if Street Fighter II was interactive.  Uhhhhh, yeah...  If I was 15 years younger and that same teacher was similarly curious today, he would probably ask, "Is Call of Duty: Black Ops going to be social?"  The questions may come from different centuries, but they are similarly retarded. 

All that being said, it's fairly safe to assume that I'm missing the point somewhere.  Though a quick search of the internet basically confirms my suspicions that the term social gaming is just a buzzword that came about as the result of a broader social trend, a discussion with my friend and colleague produced some food for thought: we decided that the games some might consider to be social (e.g., Farmville, World of Warcraft), seem to have one common characteristic: they don't draw to any natural conclusion.  You could potentially play these games your whole life.  As such, you're given the opportunity to add a new dimension to what might otherwise be considered a conventional human relationship.  That is, you might have a friend with whom you interact through conventional human means like meeting for dinner or chatting over coffee, but you also engage via the relationship defined by the game in which you share a common interest.  But I'm still left to wonder if this really is any different than people who would only otherwise associate because they enjoy playing Chess or Hungry Hungry Hippos.  I'm not sure about this, but there is one thing of which I'm certain: the only way to win at the game of life is to stop playing Farmville.

Artificial Ignorance

The worst part of playing board games is, hands down, the other players.  A computer player doesn't bail when it starts to lose at Monopoly.  But then computer players usually aren't as challenging as human players.  Go play Monopoly on Pogo.com and you'll see what I mean... the computer is always up for making a sensible, mutually beneficial property trade.  Human players, on the other hand, are belligerent, mean spirited, and incredibly short sighted.  These are the challenges I miss when playing against computer opponents.  Though it may seem strange,  I take no satisfaction in winning a fairly played, completely rational game.  It is far better to relish the demise of a dimwitted human opponent who only knows to express his frustration with misspelled expletives.

Scew u!

Making artificial players less rational is not only good for board games, it may also prove vital for the survival of mankind.  After all, in most science fiction it is the computer's cold, passionless logic that invariably concludes humanity is not only a threat to the computer, but also to itself.  It sees the only rational course of action is to obliterate or enslave the human race.  By instilling in our AI creations the same malicious stupidity that ultimately prevents us mere humans from getting our collective acts together, we may be preventing our eventual enslavement by bad-ass robot overlords of our own design.  And, more importantly, we'll have jerky robot slaves who will play Monopoly whenever we want.

HaHAA!

The bulk of my day is spent pondering how to mechanize human behaviour.  It seems to me that making existing computer players seem more human might not be that difficult.  I'd keep them greedy and cutthroat, but limit their ability to make rational decisions and plan ahead.  That way, they'll never recognize a good Monopoly trade, and they'll be incapable of remaining focused long enough to make us their slaves. 

Step away from the Ouija board!

I've known Ouija boards are bad news ever since my friends and I contacted Kurt Cobain.  It turns out he's a bit of douche, and in retrospect I wish I'd thought to ask him about the weather in Hell.  I'm surprised Courtney Love didn't cap him sooner.

Where do bad folks go when they die?

Now, it's my Christian duty to remind y'all that few things make the Virgin Mary's baby's daddy angrier than Rock 'n' Roll and teenagers with Ouija boards.  What so many consider a harmless distraction is, in reality, an $11.95 unlimited data plan, streaming text messages direct to Satan's iPhone.  It comes bundled with hell fire, demonic possession, and an eternity of anguished heavy metal torment at no extra charge.  And if you're not running out the door to go buy one now, then I'm not describing it right.

Uhhhh... save me, Jebus!

In any case, this got me thinking about what the internet might have to offer in terms of online Ouija boards and how I might rig my own to teach Bible verses and be way less fun.  It turns out that there are tonnes of online Ouija board games.  I clicked the first link on Google (Shop of Little Horrors), got spooked, and decided to watch America's Got Talent instead.  This did little to ease my spiritual turmoil.

Why, Kurt?  Why?!

Nostalgia is Dumb

Like most computer jerks, I've got boxes of old console systems stored in my parents' basement.  Unlike most computer jerks, I don't actually live in my parents' basement.  Why do I bother hanging onto them?  Because they're my parents and I love them.  As for the systems, I have no idea, and I'm not going to worry about it until I'm forced to confront my issues on national TV (e.g., Hoarders, Intervention).  But of those systems slowly succumbing to time and toxic mold in the basement, one will forever remain conspicuously absent:

My parents were too poor

I first became aware of the Atari when I was three years old, and from the moment of that initial awareness, I begged my parents to buy me one.  They didn't, of course, partly because I was too young, and partly because of the $15,000 price tag.  Instead, my brother and I had to settle for a discontinued Vectrex system (which actually was pretty awesome).  As such, I have no emotional attachment to that particular Atari system.

Nevertheless, this really warms my cockles:

Cockles: getting toasty...

That's right!  It's Halo for the Atari 2600. And just like Halo on the XBox, this game is way too hard for me. Of 64 levels, I've made it all the way to Level 3.  This is not all for lack of skillz, per se, as the controls stick sometimes.  Most of the time my guy gets smoked when he waltzes into an electrified pillar or something (this problem seems to happen less with IE than Firefox, but I may be just imagining things).