Contents
Editorial: Pity the Poor Consumer
Chris Crawford
The BBS Moves to GEnie
Chris Crawford
A Playtesting Proposal
Dave Menconi
The Political Subtext of Computer Games
Jim Gasperini
The Gnu’s Nose Knows News
Kellyn Beck, Ace Gnu
Thoughts on Creativity
Peter Oliphant
Cyberspace: Getting There From Here
F. Randall Farmer
Tit for Tat: Studies in Cooperation
Steve Estvanik
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD), through the JCGD BBS, or via direct modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are hereby notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming World.
Back Issues Back issues of the Journal are available. Volume 1 may be purchased only in its entirety; the price is $30. Individual numbers from Volume 2 cost $5 apiece.
Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1988.
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Editorial: Pity the Poor Consumer
Chris Crawford
A trip to the store
I finally broke down and bought myself a PC-compatible machine the other day. It was quite an experience. I have been spoiled by the Macintosh, and so when I walked into the store with a good friend to advise me, I was not ready for the barrage of decisions unleashed on me by the salesperson. What motherboard did I want? Did I want 10 MHz parts or 12 MHz parts? How about floppy drives? Hard drives came in six different capacities, four different average access times, three manufacturers, and a price for each combination ranging from $165 to $600. Then there were monitors, display boards, joysticks, and the mouse. And, of course, for everything there was the choice between getting the standard brand or the cheap Taiwanese or Korean version. Arg!
With the sound advice of my friend, I got over these hurdles without sounding too befuddled. (And I used to build my own hardware just ten years ago!) We bundled it home and assembled the system. All worked well once we reversed the connections of some unpolarized connectors - ahem! We fired it up and, after low-level formatting of the hard drive (!) we played around with the software configuration. Then came the piece de resistance. I opened the mouse package and out tumbled four, count ‘em, FOUR manuals. For a mouse!
The Consumer’s Problem
There’s a lesson here. The PC-clone is the dominant home computer, yet it is absurdly difficult to set up and use. Granted, my experience was towards the tail of the ease-of-use bell curve; the fact remains, though, that a mouse shouldn’t require any manuals to use.
The consumer must choose between unacceptable options. The MS-DOS option is too unfriendly for home use, while the Macintosh is too expensive. The hardware manufacturers, remembering the price wars of 1983, have written off the home market. The home consumer, our major audience, is left to twist in the wind.
But the story doesn’t end with finger-pointing at the hardware people. I decided that the very first investment I would make in software would be a couple of games — for evaluative purposes only, of course — and popped down to a local software store to look over the possibilities.
Normally I scan retail shelves as a kind of market research, trying to get a grip on industry trends. This time, though, I was doing it as a consumer, ready to part with hard-earned dollars. What a difference that makes! The first shocking realization was that there was a huge array of titles in front of me. How was I going to narrow it down to a few good options? Fortunately, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I have a pretty good idea of what titles are good and what titles are not so good.
Then came a realization that hit me like a ton of bricks. The average consumer hasn’t been around the block a few times. He doesn’t have the benefit of the industry gossip that I have. Not being a professional, he doesn’t read every magazine in the industry. He doesn’t check out the national network services for opinions on games. How in heaven’s name can the average consumer possibly choose a title from this shelf?
The situation he faces with software is exactly analogous to the situation I faced in that hardware shop. All these options, and no way of making an intelligent decision. What’s the poor consumer to do?
Why it’s our problem
Now, at this point you may be tempted to shrug your shoulders and mutter, “Not my problem.” After all, you may think, it’s the consumer’s responsibility to educate himself, to make informed purchasing decisions. You can’t worry yourself over the problems of the lazy consumer.
This kind of thinking leads nowhere. When the consumer has no ready means of making informed decisions, he ends up making random impulse purchases. If your masterpiece sits on the shelf nestled between two trashy games from Junko Software, Inc., the odds are two-to-one that the consumer will pick up the junk. It doesn’t matter that your game is better, that you spent months sweating the gameplay, that the graphics contain mightly leaps forward, or that you created entirely new algorithms for it. The crap that was tossed together in three months by the sweatshop workers at Junko will get the sale.
But that’s just the beginning of the problem. Joe Consumer, having purchased Junko-Man, will take it home, try it out, and be utterly unamused. He may come back and try something else, but the odds are that the second time around he’ll pick up something equally shoddy, and sooner or later he will come to the completely fair conclusion that computer games are cheap junk, that they do not provide enough entertainment bang for the buck, and that they are not worth either his time or his money. In short, Joe Consumer will have made the transition from Novice Computer Consumer to Experienced Computer Consumer, and he will no longer be buying our stuff.
This traps us, the game creators, in a futile hole. Since much of our market is composed of uninformed first-time purchasers, we find that quality is not rewarded. A bigger package with a bustier woman on the cover will do more to sell product than our own talent and energy. Marketing considerations pull far ahead of creative considerations. The industry stays locked in a trashy hole.
What we can do about it
We do have some options here. Our task is to inform the consumer as to the nature of our product offerings. The first cue we can give him is authorship. This is the primary means that consumers use to assess the likely value of other entertainments. Movies are sold to consumers on the merits of their actors, actresses, and directors. Books are sold on the merits of the authors. Music consumers rely on the reputation of the musician in making their decisions.
Note that the in all these cases, the corpor-ation that sells the product stays discreetly in the background. Can you name Stephen King’s publisher? Who can name the record label that carried the Beatles’ early works? And when was the last time you rushed out to see the latest movie from Paramount Studios?
The games publishers have chosen to reject the hard-earned lessons from other entertainment media. Perhaps they think that people really will identify quality with a faceless business entity rather than an artist. Perhaps they are just indulging in foolish corporate ego-tripping. Either way, they’re shooting themselves (and the rest of the industry) in the foot.
There are two things that game developers can do to help the consumer. First, we can do our bit to educate them. When was the last time you went out of your way to speak at a user group meeting? Sure, it’s fun to speak at the monster meetings with 100+ attendees, but what about the little 30-person groups? It may not be cost-effective in terms of advertising your latest game, but its contribution to the overall health of the industry is important. We need informed consumers, and direct contact is the best way to inform them.
The second contribution we can make to solving the problem of the random consumer is more difficult: we have to raise our standards. We have to increase the probability that, when he randomly picks a title, he will get something good enough to induce him to come back again.
It is said that bad product drives out good product. This may be so. But we must ask ourselves whether we are prepared to surrender the shelves to bad product. If we acquiesce to the triumph of junk games, then we might as well give up and abandonthe industry to the jackals. Our survival as a viable industry depends on our willingness to assert standards of quality high enough to ensure consumer confidence. And that willingness must come from each of us individually.
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The BBS Moves to GEnie
Chris Crawford
We set up the JCGD BBS a year ago to facilitate communication among game developers. Over the last twelve months, the BBS has seen intense debates, some great rumormongering, and useful business contacts made. However, it has never reached the majority of the subscribers to the Journal. I suspect that a major factor in this has been the high toll charges that users must pay to reach the BBS. Even I, living in San Jose, found my toll charges to Sausalito reaching unacceptable levels. Thus, when Neil Harris of GEnie offered us a new home, the advisory board for the BBS leapt at the opportunity.
We are now all set up and running on GEnie. We have our own RT (Round Table) and the discussions have been picking up speed. The best part of this is that, as a subscriber to the Journal, your time in the Game Design RT is absolutely free!
Logging On to GEnie
GEnie can only be accessed during off-hours: weekday evenings after 6:00 PM, and all day weekends and holidays. Set up your tele-communications software to dial 800 - 638 - 8369. This is a national GEnie access number; you will want to find your local access number once you are logged on. You may need to prod it with a carriage return. At the prompt “U#=”, type “XTX99623,JCGD” and a carriage return. This is our secret ID number that identifies you as a JCGD subscriber and allows you to sign up for GEnie without paying the normal sign-up fee. You will still need to supply a credit card number, and you will still have to pay normal charges for the time that you spend in other areas of GEnie; however, you will probably find these other areas well worth the expense.
Once you have logged on, you will need to send an EMail message to get set up. So move to the mail section of GEnie by selecting menu item 3 (GE Mail). The menu system for GEnie is quite clear and you should have no problem navigating your way to the mail area. Once there, select menu item 6 (Enter a Text Letter Online) to send a mail message to a fellow named “GM”. This is Richard Mulligan, our immediate host. Carbon Copy your message to “NHARRIS” and also to “CCRAWFOR”. “NHARRIS” is Neil Harris, our benefactor. “CCRAWFOR” is me. The subject of the letter should be “JCGD Free Flag”. The content should be a short sentence such as, “Hello, here I am.” When he recieves your letter, Richard will set the flag in the GEnie system that insures that your time in the Game Design RT is not billed. When I receive the copy of your letter, I will open up the gates that allow you into the Inner Sanctum of the Game Design RT.
Don’t be intimidated by all this; the GEnie system is completely menu-driven, so it is very difficult to screw up, even if you don’t have a manual. Moreover, if you need help at any point, just type “HELP” and hit the carriage return and it will explain your options.
The Game Design RT
At this point, you have done everything you need to do to get set up with GEnie, and you must wait 24 hours for Rick Mulligan to set your JCGD Free Flag. If you are impatient and willing to pay the charge, you can proceed directly to the Game Design RT. Otherwise, wait a day. Whichever way you do it, when the time comes, just type “M935” at any prompt. That command will take you to page 935, the site of the Game Design RT. Select menu item 1 (Bulletin Board) to enter the Bulletin Board area of the RT.
You will find yourself in Category 1. There are fourteen categories. However, only the first four are open to the public; categories 5 - 14 are hidden and secret. When you first enter the Bulletin Board area, GEnie won’t know that you are one of the Chosen Few and will not let you into these categories. As far as you will be able to tell, categories 5 - 14 don’t exist. Three conditions must be met in sequence before you can enter the Inner Sanctum: 1) you must copy me on the JCGD Free Flag EMail; 2) you must enter the Game Design RT; and 3) I must set the entry flag for you. For this first encounter, you can have fun in categories 1 - 4.
The most basic command in your situation would be BROWSE. This command will search through all the categories to which you have access (in this case, only the first four,) and present them to you. It will also permit you, at intervals, to reply to posted messages. For this first encounter, I recommend that you refrain from doing so. For now, just read the existing messages and get acquainted with the style of the discussions.
It will take me a day or two to read my mail, discover your message, and set the flags to let you into the hidden areas of the RT. What’s more, I can’t do it until after you have entered the Game Design RT once. There is a way to know when you are “in”: try the command “SET 5”. This command will attempt to move you into category 5, one of the hidden categories. If you are in, then it will comply; otherwise, it will blithely lie to you that there is no such category. Once you are in, you can use either the SET command or the BROwse command to read through the hidden categories. Be warned, though, that the CATegories command will still not list the hidden categories.
Guidelines
Lastly, some suggestions for gentlepersonly (gag!) behavior. We are guests on GEnie and I would like to make our presence a positive contribution to GEnie, not a liability. The public area of the Game Design RT has been set up to provide regular (read: paying) customers of GEnie with useful information. Please, take the time to contribute to the ongoing discussions there.
While you are in the public areas, please don’t give away the fact that there are private hidden areas that are not accessible to the general public. It only upsets people to know that they are Unchosen. Moreover, I don’t want to show my gratitude for GEnie’s generosity by telling its customers that they can reduce their GEnie spending by subscribing to the Journal. So let’s just keep the existence of the hidden areas our own little secret, OK?
Please take advantage of the other Round Tables on GEnie. There are a lot of them, covering a great deal of material, and I am sure that you will find some of them interesting and useful. You will have to pay for the time you spend in these RTs, but you will undoubtedly find some that are well worth the money.
As always with any telecommunications system, you must be very careful to avoid the problem of misunderstood communications. Remember, the fine nuances of voice intonation and facial expression are lost in the pure ASCII world. Offhand witticisms offered in jest can read like viscious snarls; terse rebuttals can come across as cold anger. It’s very easy for well-intentioned people to end up at each other’s throats.
To prevent this, always word your messages in as conciliatory and professional a tone as possible. Be wary of sloppy language. If you crack a joke, terminate it with the three characters semicolon - hyphen - close paren. ;-) They represent a sideways smiling face and say, “That’s a joke, friend!” I guarantee, if you don’t clearly mark it as a joke, somebody will take offense. (e.g., “Oh, yeah? Well, for you information, buster, I happen to raise chickens for a living, and I can assure you that I never allow my chickens loose near roads, and so they don’t cross them!”)
The problem is trickiest when you find yourself in the thick of a hot debate. Most people have difficulty maintaining strict standards of professional expression on bulletin boards. When that bastard on the other side of the wire lets fly with a particularly pointed broadside, it’s hard to keep your cool. All too often you shoot back a furious reply laced with juicy insinuations and clever put-downs. This is called flaming. Don’t do it — flames, like forest fires, seldom just burn out. They grow on you. Pretty soon the whole board is one raging conflagration.
We don’t want to stifle honest intellectual debate. Our profession is still young and uncertain; there is much room for major differences of opinion between intelligent people. We want those differences of opinion to get a full airing. We need a demolition derby of ideas, a barroom brawl of opinions. Please, get in there and fight eloquently for your beliefs — but keep it on an intellectual plane, not a personal one.
I urge you to join the Game Design RT on GEnie and participate in the discussions there. Our experience with the JCGD BBS showed that the community of users benefited greatly from the discussions there. Our hope is that a much larger community will be able to crystallize on GEnie. I hope to see you there!
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A Playtesting Proposal
Dave Menconi
In order to have a good feel for whether your game works you need to have someone else look at it. You cannot do this for yourself because you are too close to your game. All you know about your game is how YOU interact with it. Even if you are a very typical player of the type of games you write (which is unlikely), you know too much to be able to see it from the player’s point of view. No surprises, no new experiences, no difficult puzzles await you in your game. Furthermore, your experience of the game is inevitably as a series of small game program modules, executed to the point of meaninglessness in the exhaustive search for bugs, problems and “just the right touch.” No author could possibly see the game as a whole after he or she has looked at each piece in such detail.
But who, exactly, should you have look at your game? The more or less standard answer in our industry is, “the publisher.” For the most part this means the producer but it can also include the opinions of the company president, the director of product development, various members of the marketing staff and, sometimes, people outside the company who have been brought in to give an opinion. The upshot of this work is usually a set of suggestions for the improvement of your game. These suggestions may be more or less binding but they have probably been created without much input from you and they must now either be implemented or some explanation must be given as to why that particular idea is not appropriate to your game. The hardest part of this is that you may not have a good handle on what YOU think the game needs or, more to the point, how to obtain YOUR goals. Many of us, faced with our own uncertainty and a pretty well fixed set of suggestions from the publisher, go with the flow and implement the suggestions. And what’s wrong with that? After all, the publisher is paying for it, right?
Wrong. The publisher is paying for a game designed by you. If the game lacks polish the people at the publisher have a responsibility to make suggestions that they feel will improve the game. But they are paying for you to polish the game as much as you can. If they weren’t then they would hire a coder and do the design internally. So the responsibility to do a great game rests squarely on your shoulders.
You need a consultant who will look at the game and make suggestions, just like the producer and his or her colleagues at the publisher. The difference here is that you get the benefit of the raw information and you have the ability to choose which of the suggestions to follow and which of the solutions to try. I call this person a playtester (not to be confused with the person who performs quality assurance).
In general, playtesters are cheap. You promise them a mention in the manual or a copy of the finished game and almost anyone will play your game and make suggestions. And that’s good, because you need a number of people to represent a variety of points of view.
But I suggest that you not stop there. You need a playtester who has experience in a range of different kinds of games (e.g. computer, board, card, arcade, etc.) and an understanding of the time and space constraints inherent in computer game development. In short, you need another game designer. You should pay this person yourself (instead of having the publisher pick up the tab) because, first, you really do get what you pay for, and second, you want to be in control of the situation — if an outside contractor gives you binding suggestions it is just as bad as if the publisher gives you binding suggestions. Using playtesters will help you to polish your game to the point (we hope) that the publisher will have nothing to say except, “Thank you.” Use of a professional to playtest will give you more useful information in a short time and will provide a valuable calibration to your other playtesters.
If you decide that you want to use a professional playtester, you should consider me. I have been playtesting for about 8 years, programming for 13 and I started doing game design professionally in 1984 (although I have done other things in the interim). My rate is $20 per hour or I will give you a flat rate for the whole job. I don’t do quality assurance. My telephone number is (408) 942-0292.
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The Political Subtext of Computer Games
Jim Gasperini
[Jim is Senior Designer with TRANS Fiction Systems and author of "Hidden Agenda".]
Popular culture serves several important functions in any society. It offers diversion, escape from everyday cares, a stimulus to the imagination, an airing of the concerns of the day, a focus for discussion. And, not least, it offers a way for the culture (at least, those who guide or dominate it) to encourage its members to espouse certain values.
No matter how fantastic the fantasy, no matter how simulated the simulation, the outlines of our familiar reality will always be discernible underneath. Attitudes toward that reality are inevitably communicated, no matter how far removed from everyday reality the story may be. As the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman points out, “Every window that industrial works of fiction opens looks out not onto another reality, but into a mirror that always reflects the same thing — the reader’s own familiar surroundings.”
Dorfman’s book, “The Empire’s Old Clothes: What The Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds” offers a subtle analysis of the political subtext underlying North American popular culture. Unfortunately, there is little need for subtle analysis in examining the underlying political subtext of most of the computer game genre.
Let’s take a look at the lessons one learns playing the average computer game:
•When you go to a strange place and meet strange people, usually the wisest thing to do is to kill them first and ask questions later.
•Thou shalt steal anything not nailed down. Sometimes, if you’re clever, you can even steal the things that ARE nailed down.
•As you travel around, you will meet many races and classes of people. Some are good, and some are evil. Each race has its own strengths and weaknesses (dem ‘bards’ got rhythm, sho’ ‘nuff).
•Evil races are sometimes so bad that they must be exterminated.
•It’s fun to get a pack of friends together and wander about the forest with knives causing havoc (as Ron Martinez points out, in New York this is called ‘wilding.’)
•War is not hell. War is fun.
•The important things to learn about war are the strategy and tactics needed to win, not the complex historical and political causative forces that must be understood if you hope to avoid one.
•Advanced military technology is fun. It’s a good thing that our government spends billions on Stealth planes and SDI so that we can have such neat toys.
•Nazism is not a perversely human extrapolation of attitudes and conditions common in our civilization (Arendt’s ‘banality of evil.’) No, Nazis are warped, inhuman creatures of unimaginable villainy. Any behavior is moral if its object is to defeat Nazis and creatures of their ilk.
•The world after a nuclear holocaust will be strange and dangerous, but also romantic and full of adventure.
•It’s fun to build colonial empires. It’s satisfying to conquer planets and force the people living on them to produce enough things to make possible the conquest of more planets.
Have I left anything out?
There are quite a few games that manage to deal more broadly with human experience. I remember being delighted with the parody of the greedy, light-fingered ‘adventurer’ single-mindedly hunting treasures in “Enchanter.” I have clearly overstated my case here, but I suggest that the assumptions above do underlie many of the most popular game genres. I don’t want to take this too seriously, but sometimes I wonder: suppose Hitler had won the war. Would the games we’re playing look any differently?
The key question for me is: why? Why are we perpetuating the antique value structures of 19th century colonialism and 20th century militarism? Are these the values that we, the game developers, subscribe to ourselves?
If so, God help us, but at least we’re honestly expressing our views of the world. If not, then what does this say about our pretensions to be creating a new art form?
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The Gnu’s Nose Knows News
Kellyn Beck, Ace Gnu
We are starting a new column in the Journal this month to keep you informed about the latest industry news and gossip. The esteemed editor of the Journal asked me to take a shot at writing it partly because I’ve led him to believe that I am a former journalist, but also because I say nice things about his games. For my part, I am looking forward to occupying this space every other month; it’s just a shame that there’s so little gossip in this business.
That was a joke, people.
We’re not going to print completely unsubstantiated rumors (just partially unsubstantiated rumors), but we feel that by opening our doors and sharing information we can all benefit. However, this is a cooperative game — sort of like M.U.L.E., folks — and I’ll need your help. Call and tell me what you know. Call and tell me what you think you know.
We need your insights, discoveries, accusations, and innuendo. We will track down the answers and print whatever we find out from whoever is willing to talk. The phone number here is (503) 285-5946, and my MCI Mail address is kbeck.
I want to thank my producer, Dave Albert, and my partner, Doug Sharp, for their indispensable help and advice with this inaugural column. Well, let’s get started. The news this month is mostly about publishers, but then isn’t that our favorite topic for gossip?
Epyx Layoffs
In the latest move by a publisher adjusting to the changing market, Epyx has cancelled most of its software projects and laid off the bulk of its Redwood City work force. Exact figures were not available before our deadline, but insiders estimate that 80% of the company’s employees lost their jobs. Epyx also cancelled many projects with external developers, leaving intact that part of the company that produces cartridge-based software.
This is not the first time Epyx has used massive layoffs to cope with rapidly shifting market trends. In 1985, the company laid off 50% of its work force in a similar restructuring move. Insiders at Electronic Arts have indicated that EA is planning to concentrate more on the videogame cartridge market, but the company intends to shift its focus in an orderly fashion.
EA Goes Public
The sound you hear as you drive past San Mateo at the end of the month will be the jingling of freshly-minted coins in the pockets of newly-rich software executives. Electronic Arts joins the ranks of Microsoft, Mediagenic, and others by ending its seven-year existence as a privately-held corporation at the end of September. The software publisher is making a public stock offering, and right now a prospectus is making the rounds of investment bankers around the country in advance of the big event.
Cinemaware Joins EA
Cinemaware has signed with Electronic Arts to become one of the software giant’s affiliated labels. EA becomes the second publisher to distribute Cinemaware’s line of interactive movies. When the company opened its doors three years ago, Mindscape handled distribution of the first Cinemaware games, “Defender of the Crown”, “King of Chicago” and “Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon”. The Westlake Village firm has handled its own distribution for the past 18 months, and recently created a separate line of software from Europe to expand its product base.
[In a related story, five former Cinemaware third-party developers, disgruntled by sketchy royalty statements and late payments, are conducting a group audit of the company. —Editor]
Lucasfilm Produces Amiga Commercial
Commodore’s plan to revive the Amiga hits full stride with a commercial for network television this fall. Commodore is spending $15 million on the campaign, Lucasfilm has been hired as producer, and there’s a rumor that Neil Armstrong, Tommy Lasorda, Tip O’Neill and other celebrities have been hired to appear in the commercial. Commodore confirms that celebs are appearing in the spot, but declines to identify them in advance. Also from the rumor mill: the current script calls for a setting in a suburban home. Pretty thrilling, huh? Hold on a sec, it gets better. The father answers the door to find astronauts asking, “Is Stevie home?” Dad is nonplussed, directing the moonwalkers upstairs to the youngster’s bedroom. The doorbell rings again. This time Lasorda, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is parked on the welcome mat asking to see the young man of the house. The same scene is repeated until the kid’s room is full of celebrities, and then....no, I don’t want to spoil the ending for you. The commercial airs in October.
Commodore has also named Lauren Brown as its first Amiga Evangelist, picking up an idea from Apple that proved immensely successful for the Macintosh. Brown is charged with attracting software developers to the Amiga. Finally, a developer advisory board will be created, with members representing a cross-section of the Amiga developer community. Developers’ reactions to the new plan are mixed. Said one veteran Amiga developer, “We’ve heard it all before.”
Taito Moves to Seattle
Facing the prospect of an expiring lease at its U.S. headquarters in Montana, Taito decided the time was right to relocate in the Pacific Northwest. The publisher of “Bubble Bobble” and numerous other successful titles in the U.S. market is moving to Seattle, and has been hiring new people to staff its new offices there. Among the ranks of recently-hired Taito personnel is Shelly Day, recipient of the Producer of the Year award at this year’s Computer Game Developer’s Conference in Sunnyvale.
Riker Joins Microsoft
Also landing north of the California border is conference award-winner Greg Riker, who reported for duty at Microsoft this summer. Riker, formerly at Electronic Arts, is heading Microsoft’s new multimedia division, a 15-person group charged with exploring ways to produce non-entertainment multimedia products. Prior to Riker’s arrival, the group had been developing a scripting language along the lines of Hypertalk in an effort to develop a programming language specific to multimedia product development. Riker’s technical team at Electronic Arts took home the award for Best Technical Support at the CGDC.
Intertainment ’89 Set For October
Alexander & Associates will hold Intertainment ’89, the second edition of its interactive entertainment conference, from October 30 through November 1. For this year’s conference, the New York consulting firm has lined up 90 speakers who will tackle a range of topics including computer games, interactive television, CD-ROM and CD-I, and live interactive performing. The event will be held at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, and the cost of attending is $700 (there is a $150 discount for early registration before September 30). For more information, contact Sally Chin at (212) 382-3929.
Request for Information
John Reego of Atomic Entertainment has a request for any developers who have done business with Activision/Mediagenic and would like to discuss their experiences. Would they please call him at (805) 985-9392?
Industry Directory
Jack Thornton at Infinite Automata is putting together a much-needed industry directory. If you haven’t received a letter from Jack about it, call him at (702) 735-1800. Hurry – the deadline for listings is October 15th!
Call for Papers
The Conference Committee is now accepting proposals for presentations to be made at the 1990 Computer Game Developers’ Conference to be held on April 1-2 in San Jose. If you would like to present a speech or chair a panel discussion at this conference, please prepare an outline or letter describing the content of your presentation. (For panel discussions, you assume the responsibility to recruit panel members.) Attach a resume of participants and send it to:
Computer Game Developers’ Conference
PO Box 50282
Palo Alto, CA 94303
The deadline for proposals is November 15th. Competition for the lecture slots at this conference is intense, so you are well-advised to prepare your proposal thoroughly. Speakers at the conference receive free registration.
That’s it for this month. See you next time, and call or write with anything you’d like to see printed here. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
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Thoughts on Creativity
Peter Oliphant
Having just watched the Crawford Tape “Creativity and Game Design” I’d like to mention two seldom-considered sources of creativity: partial information and misunderstanding.
The mind stores information about a new concept or object much like a database. It decides what properties are probably important and sets up “fields” in which to record these properties. Usually these include what it does and how it does it. One of the more interesting peculiarities about the brain is its reluctance to place a “Don’t Know” value in one of these fields! The mind prefers to use one of its more important tools for filling in unknown fields: the imagination. Given a “black box” and told what it does the mind will start formulating theories of how it does it in order to place something substantial in that field. Note that this is not necessarily the way that the object itself goes about doing what it does. In this fashion the mind has the ability to inadvertently create new and different (and potentially better) processes for existing tasks.
The mind is also reluctant to find new ways to accomplish old tasks. It is even more reluctant to spend time trying to invent processes for tasks it is not sure can be accomplished. Adding constraints to the existing problem will push it into the unsolved category and maximize the solving environment. I call this method of inducing creativity partial information [PI]. PI can work equally well on fields other than WHAT IT DOES and HOW IT DOES IT. For game design it can be used, for example, with the three fields WHAT IS THE ACTION, WHAT ARE THE GRAPHICS, and WHAT IS THE STORY. If a group of people are shown an arcade game being played and asked “Of course, you know why the Girobots are blasting the Ramascanners?” the discussion which follows could easily turn into a brainstorming session to design the story line! The “of course” was important since it gave the audience the feeling that a story line already existed and that they had only to discover what that existing story line is (and also gives them the impression that the task of coming up with the story line is an easy one since it is “so obvious”). PI can be used to generate both incremental and grand leap creativity. If no known solution exists, then a successful use of PI can be an example of grand leap creativity. If a constraint to an existing problem with a known solution pushes it into the unsolved category and PI is successful then this can be an example of incremental creativity.
The other method of generating creativity I mentioned is misunderstanding. This works in a similar fashion to partial information, except instead of missing information the mind is presented with incorrect information. When this happens the mind will tend to try to adjust all of the other fields to account for plausibility of the erratum and can “accidentally” solve a problem that no one ever thought of!! I equate this intellectually with the process of Mutation in Evolution. If one of the genes (information) is copied erroneously then the resulting organism, if survivable (solvable), will exhibit new features which more than likely never appeared before in the organisms family tree (history). Furthermore, if the new feature is an advantageous one to survival (better mousetrap) then it will tend to be present in future generations (the new solution replaces the old solution).
As to creativity generated by misunderstanding, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that, when it works, it tends towards the Grand Leap direction since it ventures into areas as yet totally unexplored. The bad news is that it far less controllable or predictable than partial information. At least in partial information it is known what is to be accomplished and what the end result is; it can be directed to solve a particular need. Misunder-standing has a mind of its own, and can more easily come up with a totally worthless process than one that is important; that is, if it doesn’t die a horrible death all together! It also requires much observational creativity on the part of the participants since an important process is not always easily recognizable as such. The best method I can suggest for using misunder-standing is to purposefully falsify data when presenting a problem and see what happens (try mumbling).
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Cyberspace: Getting There From Here
F. Randall Farmer
[Randy was lead C64 programmer on the fabled Habitat project for Lucasfilm Games. He has taken a hiatus from building Cyberspace while he works on a new telecommunications product at AMIX, a subsidiary of Autodesk. He can be reached via Usenet as randy@xanadu.com or through the Journal RT on GEnie.]
© Copyright 1989 F. Randall Farmer
“Golden Vaporware” is a term Ted Nelson uses to describe such exciting computer projects as Xanadu, Dynabook and Cyberspace. I understood the term to mean Really-Great-Stuff-That-People-Are-(Sort-Of)-Working-On-And-Never-Ship. But now, it seems, “The Age Of Golden Vaporware” has arrived. Ted’s Xanadu project is now well under way and should ship product in ’90. A company called Dynabook Technologies that has released “step 2” of the “20 steps” to Alan Kay’s vision of the ultimate laptop. And QuantumLink and Lucasfilm have prototyped Cyberspace with Habitat.
These projects are likely to succeed not because they are exciting to us techie-geeks, but because they have solid commercial and technical foundations. Here I will illustrate a path from current software and hardware technologies to the Cyberspace that many of us have dreamed of for almost 20 years.
What is Cyberspace anyway?
“Cyberspace” is a fuzzily defined word that has been in the press a lot recently (at least in Silicon Valley). Vernor Vinge first described a vision of what might now be called Cyberspace in his novella True Names. The hero of Vinges’s story connected to “The Other Plane” using EEG electrodes placed on the forehead. The Other Plane was a place where complicated software systems were represented by familiar objects. The Max Headroom television show used similar representations in various episodes. Other fictional treatments include William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which has been turned into a popular graphic adventure, and other “Cyberpunk” novels. Here the vision of Cyberspace is based around commercial and governmental network computer access, where “cowboys” and “wizards” break in and wreak fiscal havoc. In these works, Cyberspace is a metaphor for abstract concepts.
Autodesk, maker of the AutoCAD system, has thrown its hat into the Cyberspace ring where it joins VPL’s Jaron Lanier and NASA-AMES. All of these products share similar base technologies and assumptions: two head-mounted TV monitors for stereo imaging, a powerful computer, and a 3D input device like VPL’s DataGlove. They are primarily single user systems, and, in the case of at least Autodesk’s product, probably aimed at CAD users who want to edit drawings in three dimensions. There are many other applications, but discussion is beyond the scope of this article. The key to all of these systems is enough computer power to do double-buffered stereoscopic real-time graphics at a high frame rate (say 20-30 frames/second). This technology is expensive: in the case of VPL’s “virtual reality” system (their special two user version) the price tag weighs in at $69,925. The “Eyephones” cost $9,400 and the glove $8,800. These companies envision Cyberspace as a new kind of user interface.
To me, Cyberspace is a place, not just an interface or a metaphor. A place where people, regardless of location, hardware, or purpose can get together in a participatory experience to conduct business, socialize, or have a good game of SpaceCombat 9.6.
Why this vision instead of the others? People. Unlike the interactions with artificial personalities used in computer adventure games, Cyberspace interactions could create relationships that are greater than the sum of their parts. Here the consequences of individual actions take on a greater significance because they affect the world of the other participants. Because Cyberspace will be so malleable, each individual can participate in its ongoing creation and adaptation.
This is not speculation! During Habitat‘s beta test, several social institutions sprang up spontaneously: There were marriages and divorces, a church (complete with a real-world Greek Orthodox minister), a loose guild of thieves, an elected sheriff (to combat the thieves), a newspaper (with a rather eccentric editor), and before long two lawyers hung up their shingle to sort out claims. And this was with only about 150 people! My vision encompasses tens of thousands of simultaneous participants.
How can it work?
There are several major problems facing a large-scale Cyberspace system: Bandwidth, Graphic Resolution, User Interface Standards, Event Integrity, Data Communications Standards, and Computer Horsepower.
Bandwidth is the most overrated problem. Everybody thinks you need to send megabytes of data every minute to each user in order to make Cyberspace work. This is simply not true. Habitat works at a mere 300 baud. The keys to keeping bandwidth down are distributed processing (having the local computer do most of the display and interface work), object oriented command messages, and avoiding communication intensive graphics primitives (such as those associated with NAPLPS, that slower-than-molasses protocol they use for Prodigy and other Videotex systems).
Graphic Resolution, User Interface and Local Horsepower issues should all be lumped together. To be viable over time, Cyberspace must be designed with the “to each according to his abilities” principle. If a C64 with NTSC TV and joystick-only interface encounters a 60 megahertz 486 user with Eyephones and DataGlove, the interaction should be filtered so that each user can have a satisfying experience (e.g the C64 user doesn’t see all the intricate detail the 486er has put into his attire, and everybody walks with exactly the same coarse animation, but they can still sit, chat, and play a nice game of Strattagema.)
Event Integrity is a side effect of distributed processing. Simply put: you can’t trust the home computer. Hackers have all the time in the world to crack the software and make it send messages it shouldn’t. This is akin to the long-debated copy protection problem, but comes with its own unique solution: The Host. Since the host is the final arbiter of all events, it should be programmed at a very high level to reject bad messages.
Data Communications Standards are key to the future viability of Cyberspace. A protocol is required that is efficient and forward-looking, with hooks for future revisions (as bandwith increases) and data encryption. Anything that is going to be used for business will need to transmit its data securely for protection against espionage. Also, the standard needs to address such issues as Email and gateways to those entrenched text-only systems. I want to read my Usenet mail printed on a sheet of paper in my Cyberhand!
Since the host coordinates all activity for all users, Host Horsepower is by far the most critical issue. For the first few years of operations, Cyberspace will have a single centralized host consisting of several connected multi-processing computers. In order to keep overhead to a minimum, bandwidth and database access will need to be tightly limited. The communications protocol will need to be efficient and messages must be kept tiny. Eventually there will be several independent Cyberspaces, perhaps on LANs or a large BBS. Of course, while you are walking around in your office Cyberspace, you might want to go to other Cyberspaces, so a distributed host model will need to be designed. By not having a central host keep track of everything and everyone, this distributed model will actually decrease the load on each host. This will allow Cyberspace to take on a few interesting features: 1) Each host can be a different kind of place, with different ‘rules’ (e.g. A role-playing Cyberhost would probably have monsters, combat rules – including character death – and a no-holds-barred policy about participant behavior whereas an office Cyberhost would have access protection and wouldn‘t allow personal combat of any type), 2) Increased capacity without loss of access, and 3) Faster growth.
When will it happen?
Rather than pin a date on my Cyberverse, I will outline a possible implementation path, including all of the developments publicly announced to date.
“Habitat” A.K.A. “The Poor Man’s Cyberspace”
Ship Low End Prototype:
Third person, 2D, Low resolution, Low bandwidth, multi-user Cyberspace with joystick/keyboard interface
Purpose: Entertainment
Fall? 1990 “CyberCad”
Ship commercial CAD version of Cyberspace InterfaceEyephones, DataGlove/DataSuit. First person, single-user 3D graphics (wire frame on small computers).
Purpose: Commercial CAD
AT&T starts installing nationwide ISDN,Promises installation by 2001 (this should drive bandwidth to 1.5gigabits/second!)
‘DataGlove, the cheap version’ arrives.
9600/19.2k baud modems <$100 dollars
A Cyberspace team defines the first Cyberspace Data and Communications Standards (an event they will regret later when this interim hack becomes the defacto standard)
486/68040 50+ megahertz computers sell for <$1000 dollars.
(about 1995) “Cyberverse 1.0” (U.S.? Japan?)
Ship first multi-purpose Cyberspace universe Eyephones optional, mouse or glove required
Local data stored on high density media (CDROM?) 9600baud minimum speed, LAN version available. (host still required)
Computers get 10X faster and 10X more memory/storage.
AT&T still installing ISDN
(about 2000) Japan completes ISDN installation, selling ISDN ‘modems’ cheap!
First ‘cracker’ group has successfully done measurable damage to the global Cyberverse.
The back doors are all closed. Or are they?
After cursing the original Cyberdesigners for several years now, the Data and Comm standards are updated to support. multi- and distributed-host models. Massive testing required.
First suicide attributed, by the media, to a game played while in Cyberspace.
First combination television/phone/computer successfully mass marketed??
(about 2000) “Cyberverse 2.0” Ship distributed host version Supports latest user interface hardware (optionally). Now a host is not required.
(about 2010) AT&T finally completes ISDN. Wall size videophone reaching suburban markets (10-20 years late?)
Congress takes significant note of the Cyberverse, because trade unions (and other lobbies) note significant changes in the distribution of political power.
First Cyberspace lobby arrives in Washington.
10-20% of Americans spend over 4 hours per day “on the Other Side”. First chapter of Mothers Against Cyberspace forms, claims ‘Junior’ never goes out to play…(We gotta think about this stuff too, ya know!)
(the Future) “Cyberverse 3.0” A.K.A. “The Big Payoff” Distribute version 3.0 via Cybersoft retail outlets in Cyberspace 100,000+baud, allowing life-like personalizations
EEG direct input? Hologram Video? Retinal Projection? Full Body digitizing? Forced feedback? Voice input/output? World access via remote-robots?
Farmer, you’re full of Cybercrud!
Oh, yeah? A 386/CDROM version of Habitat will soon be released in Japan. Other foreign companies are also interested in this technology, and some are talking about multi-machine support, standards, and the future. My only fear is that the long-term nature of this project will cause American companies to shy away, and let yet another new technology be monopolized by other, more forward-looking nations.
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Interactivity – and the consequent active role that it confers upon the player – constitutes the essential difference between computer games and other artistic media; thus, computer games are to other media as lovemaking is to pornography.
— Chris Crawford
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Tit for Tat: Studies in Cooperation
Steve Estvanik
My goal in designing Incunabula and By Fire & Sword was to create a multi-player game in which many strategies were possible to accomplish the goals. Thus, in Incunabula, you confront computer players with varying personalities, memories, and strategies. You might choose a purely military strategy, but this is unlikely to succeed. You must also bargain shrewdly with the other players as traders. While Incunabula was written before Axelrod’s book “The Evolution of Cooperation”, when I read it, I found I had coded that book’s central theme into my game. The essence of both techinques was a variation on the golden rule that Axelrod terms ‘tit for tat’. Basically, “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”, with the important addition: “if done onto, do back onto them promptly!”
Players in Incunabula accumulate trade goods each turn, based on the type of terrain their people occupy. Each type of terrain produces a limited variety of goods. Thus rice occurs along the coast, plains and mountains; copper in desert and mountains; and spice in coasts or deserts. Since the game takes place before the invention of the ziploc baggie, spoilage occurs if players hold more than 6 of a commodity at the end of a turn.
To simulate the effects of controlling a market, the value of a given commodity is the square of the number of items held times the intrinsic value. Thus, while 1 ivory is worth 8, 2 ivories are worth 2 x 2 x 8 = 32 and so on, up to the maximum holding of 6 (6 x 6 x 8 = 288). So, while one of something is worth only its basic value to you, it is worth much more to anyone who holds more of that item. Now trading starts to get interesting. This is an example of what game theorists call a non-zero sum game. With cooperative trades each party ends up richer than when they started. For example, if you trade 1 incense, worth only 7 to you, to someone who already owns 5 incense the marginal value of that incense is worth 77 to them. (The difference between the new value for 6 incense (252) and the old value for 5 (175). Players need to make offers for trade goods based on the worth of the other player’s offering plus their holdings, not on its face value. Thus a given trade offering will have widely differing values to different players.
Trading attitudes profoundly affect play. In each trading round every player gets a chance to tender goods. The other players, after calculating the worth of each offer, make bids from their own holdings. The tendering player then selects the bid s/he likes the best. Since no one knows the exact worth of a bid to anyone else, you must build trust in your trading partners. If players try to win every deal, they’ll find others unwilling to trade with them. However, when players go out of their way to make trades, they find the computer players more willing to trade with them.
In some computer games, the semblance of intelligence is achieved by allowing the computer players access to all the data. (To put it charitably, the computer peeks!) The computer players in Incunabula have no more knowledge of any other players’ holdings than you do. Also, they’re not silicon chauvinists. That is, they don’t act preferentially towards other computer players. But, they do perform the calculations needed to evaluate a proposal in terms of what it will do for them. Based on this evaluation they decide which trade goods to offer in return. When an offer from a computer player seems particularly generous, it’s usually an indication that the original offering fits well with that player’s holdings.
In addition, the computer players consider past trades. If a player has traded with them before, they will make allowances for that. Thus, if player A’s offer is worth 40 to them and player B’s is worth only 35 but B has previously accepted one of their offers, they may decide to repay that acceptance and take the lower bid, in hope of cementing the relationship. This concept uses some of the ideas developed in Axelrod’s book.
It’s almost a reverse human psychology that allows the program to do best in a competitive atmosphere by being the most willing to compromise and appearing to give in. In fact, my Incunabula trader rarely loses in trading deals.
Axelrod describes a series of computer tournaments for programs written to play Prisoner’s Dilemma. His conclusions are that in games of this sort, you do best by cooperating with everyone as much as possible, and by reacting immediately to ’defections’ (’Tit for Tat’ ).
Axelrod describes four main points in his theory of cooperation:
DON’T BE ENVIOUS Forget zero sum thinking. Stop thinking about how you’ re doing compared to all the other players, and instead look at how you’ re doing compared to other people with the same resources you control. At some points in the game this may amount to the same think, but often it will allow you to cooperate with someone that a zero summer may see only as an enemy. Try to elicit behavior from other players that lets you BOTH do well.
DON’T BE FIRST TO DEFECT This makes most sense when an ongoing relationship can be expected. If an action is going to be one time, with no possibility of followup, then being the first to defect from an agreement may even be the correct strategy. But few choices are this clear-cut, so if there is any doubt, following Tit for Tat works best.
RECIPROCATE BOTH COOPERATION AND DEFECTION It may be less obvious that defection must be reciprocated for this plan to work. However, if it isn’t, then the best strategy becomes one of always defecting first. If the opponent reciprocates, then choose cooperation, but if not, continue to defect. This bully mode then dominates. But in a true Tit for Tat community, the bully will soon be ignored by all the cooperating players.
DON’T BE TOO CLEVER In any game in which these strategies are going to work, the opposing player must be able to figure out what you are doing. Don’t choose a plan so complex that your decisions can’t be distinguished from random events. (Yet another example of the K.I.S.S. theory)
Axelrod gives many examples of real world cases of this sort of cooperation without explicit communication. One of the most amazing is the recounting of undeclared truces during the trench warfare of WWI. One of the reasons that trench warfare was so conducive was that it was not, as in so many battles, a one move game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, but an ongoing game over many months. Many unwritten accomodations were made by the nominally warring sides. Axelrod shows how these unwritten rules were even passed on to fresh troops as they came to the lines. As just one example, units often refrained from aiming when they fired at opposing enemy trenches, keeping casualties down during lulls in the major offensives. “During periods of mutual restraint, the enemy soldiers took pains to show each other that they could indeed retaliate if necessary. For example, German snipers showed their prowess to the British by aiming at spots on the walls of cottages and firing until they had cut a hole.”
In the biological arena, the concepts of Environmentally Stable Strategies have been developed by Hamilton and Maynard Smith. This is a rich area for study and concentrates on the best strategies competitors can find when competing for mates.
Putting these ideas into practise results in computer opponents that seem to react to players’ decisions. The opponents are richer and seem to interact more than computer AI that just uses an evaluation function to make a decision. Some of the appearances of intelligence are achieved by what the computer players remember. If you refuse to bid at all, that will be remembered and held against you later. The worst thing you can do is make an offer, then reject all bids. The computer players understand that you can’t accept all bids. Thus while the players whose bid you accept will remember your good choice, the other players won’t hurt you for rejecting them. But if you refuse all players, then they will start to look elsewhere.
References:
Robert Axelrod, “The Evolution of Cooperation”, (NY: Basic Books, Inc, 1984).
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