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A Reflection


Ephesos

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As I reflect on the years of my life I've frittered away on these boards and in this community, I can't help but feel let down. I look back at the 5,000 posts I've made, and I can't help but feel that at least 4,200 of them were total, utter drivel. I look at the community that exists in the present day, and I feel like I no longer belong.

 

And Blades. I probably shouldn't talk about Blades right now.

 

So, a toast to a life misspent, and a toast to a nice, even-numbered heap of spam.

 

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Originally Posted By: Ephesos
As I reflect on the years of my life I've frittered away on these boards and in this community, I can't help but feel let down. I look back at the 5,000 posts I've made, and I can't help but feel that at least 4,200 of them were total, utter drivel. I look at the community that exists in the present day, and I feel like I no longer belong.


Aw, poor Ephesos. frown

I hope you know that we appreciate your presence here: as a member, as a moderator, and as a designer. The opposite might seem to be true as of late, but I highly doubt that it is, and I would be surprised if any recent posts were made with the intent of bringing you down. I think there's just a lot of misunderstanding going on, and that's all. smile

*huggles*
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Actually I think the decline of Blades has been an enormous factor for these boards. As I understand it, BoE designing was relatively easy, so a lot of people got into making stuff that looked pretty good by the standards (or the 2D genre, if you will) of the day. People gathered here who were interested in creative scenario design, working in a medium whose entry barrier was low.

 

Things moved on, and the effort needed to make a BoE scenario effectively rose because great scenarios raised the bar, while the sense of achievement people felt for making one sank a lot, because 2D CRPGs started to look lame in comparison with commercial games. BoA is (as I understand it) a lot harder to use than BoE, the great BoE scenarios still count as the standard for success, and BoA now looks lame even in comparison with current Spiderweb games. So BoA activity has stayed fairly low.

 

I think that this must be a common pattern in moddable game series. The first two installments of Escape Velocity, for instance, brought dozens of 'total conversions' in which people made their own entire space-opera universes. Some of these were amazing, and raised the bar high. EV: Nova, the third installment, has a much more sophisticated engine and is much harder to design for, and there has really only been one large, complete TC produced (though it is awesome).

 

In fact I think the era of consumer-designers may have been a brief but interesting historical period that we have just lived through. Anyone who can type can (try to) write a book, and the plain text genre is well established and clear. A novelist doesn't need to be a calligrapher, photographer, graphic artist, and bookbinder as well, or form a five-person team to cover all those roles, to make a book. But the entry barrier for film directing is a lot higher. And over the past twenty years, computer games seem to have crept from somewhere near the book level to somewhere near the feature film level.

 

Back in the day, anybody who could type could make a computer game. Thirty years ago I was writing blocky, black-and-white games in BASIC for my younger brothers to play on our TRS-80, and they didn't look too bad in comparison with shrink-wrapped games. When games first started getting more sophisticated, the idea that ordinary people might mess with them was still around, so a lot of game companies invested effort in enabling modding. It wasn't just Jeff; it was in the air, everybody was doing it. But the technical complexity kept rising, and it got too hard or too expensive to maintain designer environments that would let a schoolkid turn out a Crysis. As of some time in the past five years, I would say, the consumer-designer has finally been left in the dust. The gap between the amateurs who could do BoE or EV: Override, and the professionals who can make (for a minimum) Geneforge V: Overthrow, is perhaps being filled now by the 'semi-professionals' who make Flash games.

 

Is this a finished story or just an episode? Will 'make your own game' kits eventually catch up to the state of the art? No, I think it may be a fundamental thing. I think the whole point of computer games is to be a hot medium like a film rather than a cool medium like a book. The basic pay-off for a computer game is not just game or just graphics, but a game whose look-and-feel suits it so well that the whole is more than a simple sum of the elements — like a movie, which needs to have plot and cinematography working together or there's no point in making it. And that means that Crysis-for-dummies kits with prefab graphics packs aren't really going to offer more than ho-hum clones of established games. Anyone with a really new, creative idea for a computer game is also going to need to custom-make a lot of technical stuff, and that lays the amateur designer in the grave for good. RIP.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
I think that this must be a common pattern in moddable game series. The first two installments of Escape Velocity, for instance, brought dozens of 'total conversions' in which people made their own entire space-opera universes. Some of these were amazing, and raised the bar high. EV: Nova, the third installment, has a much more sophisticated engine and is much harder to design for, and there has really only been one large, complete TC produced (though it is awesome).


you're still wrong about The Frozen Heart by the way, it totally rules

Quote:
As of some time in the past five years, I would say, the consumer-designer has finally been left in the dust. The gap between the amateurs who could do BoE or EV: Override, and the professionals who can make (for a minimum) Geneforge V: Overthrow, is perhaps being filled now by the 'semi-professionals' who make Flash games


this isn't really true at all, people are making total conversion mods for games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion and they're doing some pretty impressive things with them

also marshall mcluhan said a lot of good things but his distinction between hot and cold media tends to break down in practice
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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
The basic pay-off for a computer game is not just game or just graphics, but a game whose look-and-feel suits it so well that the whole is more than a simple sum of the elements — like a movie, which needs to have plot and cinematography working together or there's no point in making it. And that means that Crysis-for-dummies kits with prefab graphics packs aren't really going to offer more than ho-hum clones of established games. Anyone with a really new, creative idea for a computer game is also going to need to custom-make a lot of technical stuff, and that lays the amateur designer in the grave for good. RIP.
I dunno, SoT. I don't think the point of spin-your-own-scenario/make-your-own-mod games is to customize everything and create exquisite masterworks that new players will look on and go "ooooooh!" The point is to give people a chance to create. The joy is more in the creation than the auditing, honestly. This is particularly true for kids. Even though they are unlikely to complete anything even remotely polished, the very idea that they, yes, THEY can turn their own ideas into an explorable world is mind-blowing. (Why do you think the SW boards were initially so full of 10-15 year olds, a group that is more of a minority these days?)

I would also assert that "ho-hum clones of established games" do very well in the RPG industry. To the degree in which CRPG players overlap with gamers-at-large, which is a lot greater now than it was 20 years ago, there is demand for state-of-the-art graphics. And typical game mechanics have certainly evolved over time. But most individual games break very, very, very few conventions. Most individual games have generic plots and similar expectations of what the player needs to do, and repeat the exact same mechanics that players are used to. And let's not even talk about the Japanese CRPG scene, where Dragon Quest clones have been the name of the game for 23 years, yet scenario-creation packages have been more popular (and FAR more commercially successful) than they were here.
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Actually SoT, what your missive seems to boil down to is that the typical BoE player is now craving Halo for video game experience, but Blades is not a video game. It's more the book, and while yes, you do need to have some experience with programming to make BoA work, there are tools to make the story-telling much easier.

 

Heck, I play Blades for the storylines anyways, and hope the rest of the designer's work doesn't distract me from it too much. I, too, hope that the media continues to be used, and promoted, as a story-telling environment, a la CYOA.

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Frozen Heart is a great TC, but the right few extra paragraphs could have made it great art, and it bugs me that they aren't there.

 

What is it with Fallout 3 and Oblivion that keeps their mod communities still active? What have they got that BoA and EVN don't have?

 

I'd like to think that BoA can work as interactive fiction, but why go to the all the trouble to make turn-based battles and low-res artwork, if what you're really trying to do is tell a short story? Why not write text adventures?

 

But actually the all-text interactive fiction community has been thinning out for years now, too. Text hasn't gotten any flashier, so why are these guys dying out now, too?

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Originally Posted By: If You Seek Amygdalae
And let's not even talk about the Japanese CRPG scene, where Dragon Quest clones have been the name of the game for 23 years, yet scenario-creation packages have been more popular (and FAR more commercially successful) than they were here.


Forget Dragon Quest, Japan is still churning out Wizardry clones.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Frozen Heart is a great TC, but the right few extra paragraphs could have made it great art, and it bugs me that they aren't there.


By the way, did you ever read the novelisation of it?

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
But actually the all-text interactive fiction community has been thinning out for years now, too. Text hasn't gotten any flashier, so why are these guys dying out now, too?


I think this article has a lucid explanation. Basically, making good IF requires two skills that aren't often found in the same person: programming ability and writing ability. And now that you don't have to be a programmer to mess around with computers, those skills are even less likely to be found together than they used to be.
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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
But actually the all-text interactive fiction community has been thinning out for years now, too. Text hasn't gotten any flashier, so why are these guys dying out now, too?

Because everything dies. Seriously. Tell me what game communities haven't thinned out over time? And if you're going to bring up something ancient like chess, let me point out that its market share (so to speak) has clearly declined.
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Originally Posted By: If You Seek Amygdalae

Because everything dies.


No, some things just change, and a few things (like chess) don't even do that. Books and paintings are still going strong after millennia, and though genres and techniques have evolved, they're still books and paintings.

Perhaps games like BoA are just not really substantial genres like writing or painting. The constraint of working with a bunch of sprites and pop-up text boxes, and turn-based combat with a finite set of options, is just too tight. It's too hard to have to make not just a good story, but an idiot-proof story that will be good no matter what crazy thing the player tries. There are only so many good scenarios to be made, and too much of what makes these good is overcoming the genre's limitations, rather than exploiting its strengths.

I suppose IF might be dying because writers never program now, but I'm not convinced. Nobody ever had to be able to program to run a word processor under DOS, and modern IF languages are more accessible than they used to be. I think it's more that IF is a pony with fewer tricks than I used to suppose.

The IF works that at the time made me think IF was a great new genre all had story and puzzle strongly woven together. The puzzles were motivated and given flavor by the story, and the game mechanics did things for the story that you can't get in a normal book. I'm thinking of Plotkin's "Spider and Web", with it's amazing one-word turning point, or Cadre's "Varicella", which I called "iterature" because you figure out what is going on by reloading many times. In both these games, the crux is that the player doesn't know everything the protagonist is supposed to know, and you play largely to figure this out. Although these works are maybe the only ones to really make hay from this situation, it's pretty much inevitable in IF. Maybe it's really the only interesting thing to be gained by taking the trouble to do IF instead of a pure story or pure game, and once it's been handled well a few times, IF is tapped out.
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I'm just pushing a case to see how far it will go, or how hard it will push back. Not to be obnoxious — I really want to know these things. I've often thought about doing a BoA scenario or an IF game, and this year I finally started some messing around with EVN, spending quite a few hours writing descriptions and plot outlines and trying to make a hyperspace train. But I've got a demanding job and a family, and my time is more limited than it once was. I need to have a better feeling for whether this stuff has legs or not, before I invest a lot in it. The fact that it seems to be in decline everywhere is not encouraging.

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I don't think IF is tapped out, but I think works like those are few and far between regardless of medium. I think the things you and I love about them are in abstract not specific to IF, though the way it unfolds in each individual case is medium-specific.

 

It takes a certain kind of artist to create something like that. Andrew Plotkin certainly has created a number of games that have or approach having that kind of elegance. Cliff Johnson, 3 in Three, The Fool's Errand. I can throw out other names too. These games are bound by author and not by medium. The thing is that creative people, like anybody else, are more likely to work with media that are more popular.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Well, but if IF still has lots of room to grow, why isn't more of it being made lately? It's unpopular just because it's unpopular?


Maybe so. It's a network effect: the fewer people who are using a medium, the harder it is to publicise it, and the less potential reward there is for producing something in that medium. This is especially true when the consumers and the producers of the medium are part of the same community.
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Originally Posted By: Slarty
And if you're going to bring up something ancient like chess, let me point out that its market share (so to speak) has clearly declined.


Rescind your anti-chess comment immediately, Slarty, or face hordes of angry masters outside your door armed with pitchforks. Chess is far and away the most popular game in history- it's been around over a millenia, with consistent popularity throughout. Might I bring to your attention that 605 million people know how to play chess worldwide, nearly 10% of the world's population? To compare, chess has more players than adding up the players of the the top 10 best-selling games on PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii combined and multiplied by 2. It would take one hundred thousand Spiderweb forums with every single registered user active in order to replicate chess' current popularity. So much for "declining market share".
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~700 million people have played Monopoly. That doesn't mean that all of those 700 million people own a Monopoly board, nor does it mean that all of them play it often. Sure, a lot of people know how to play chess, but that doesn't mean they play it on a regular basis (or even have a chess board). I'd imagine that a lot of people who have played World of Warcraft own the game, and play it on a regular basis, or at least much more so than chess.

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Dantius is in fact making the same point I was. I wasn't saying chess has poor market share, I was saying its market share is vastly decreased from ages past when the options for serious strategy games were much, much more limited.

 

And we all know the light blue monopoly is the best one. There's actual a statistics paper proving that somewhere on the internet.

 

Monopoly asks if your person has a big nose. Discuss.

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Heh. Welcome to the world of probabilities. The only way to roll a 2 on two dice is snakeyes. But there are 6 different ways to get a total of 7. So you roll 7 six times more often than 2. And so on. The chance of getting a 7 is actually 1 in 6, that of a 2 is 1 in 36. And this is the beginning of a whole fascinating world, if you think about it.

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Yeah, and that doesn't account for things such as velocity, starting position, air pressure, dice composition, cats, spin, stray cosmic particles deciding to mess with you... and so forth.

 

(It's late. I'm tired. And in a rare twist, I oversimplified)

 

EDIT: The new subject to mangle is Basic English. *headdesk*

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I've always liked the reds as well. They overall cost is higher than the oranges, but the payoff is a bit better. Also, my brothers math class did an analysis on this a long time ago. Over time, I think the reds get landed on the most. In theory, of course. In practice, my family never seems to be able to land on them. Oranges and yellows are nice.

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Originally Posted By: Master1
I've always liked the reds as well. They overall cost is higher than the oranges, but the payoff is a bit better. Also, my brothers math class did an analysis on this a long time ago. Over time, I think the reds get landed on the most. In theory, of course. In practice, my family never seems to be able to land on them. Oranges and yellows are nice.

Illinois Ave. is actually the most landed on space in the game. Someone took the time to find this out by running a computer simulation.

Also, it's often better not to buy hotels in the first place. When you build a hotel, you throw four houses back into the bank that your opponent can use against you.

Originally Posted By: Nioca
Yeah, and that doesn't account for things such as...cats

Heh, it's more annoying when you're playing scrabble. Then you have to put all the tiles back in place.
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Originally Posted By: Nikki
It's all about the train stations


Yes. And the utilities, useless as they may seem, have massive revenues. You know the card that says "advance to the nearest utility and pay owner ten times what he is owed"? Well, if he rolled a 12, times 10 for owning both, times 10 for the card, means you earned 1200 dollars on a property that cost you 300, the largest single profit margin in the game.
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