Universal Agreements

We tend to live today in what most people would agree as a Relativistic world. I don't mean precisely that we all can see things using a frame of motion of 4/5c and everything is smacked over the head with the gamma value (haha Mudd joke), but rather that people seem to believe in a relativistic model of morality and ethics. I believe one thing and you believe one thing based perhaps on upbringings, social constraints, views of relatives and friends, schooling, and so on. Thus, my view is different but not more "correct" than yours since it's all perhaps just a derivation of environment.

Many enjoy the versatility and acceptance that this view provides. Sure we all disagree, but we can all reflect and accept everyone! Plus, it avoids lots of sticky edge cases. For example, if we had a belief system that murder (defined as intentionally taking of another human's life) is "bad" then how do we reconcile the "Kill one, save a million" problem? Or, even better, where do we draw the line as to what is a "human's life"? Suddenly we need huge numbers of clauses and rebuttals for how the rule that "murder is evil" operates. Ew. Why not just say that I personally hold that "murder is evil" and leave it that? It's all relativistic anyways, so I could be completely wrong, but it doesn't matter.

Ironically this view also allows for an extremely rigid Universal Truth viewpoint to exist. Universal Truths holds that there are certain things that are purely and unequivocally true. The most familiar of course would be that there is a God and that its rules of morality are the "correct" rules for Good and Evil. Since Relativistic allows any and all views to exist without one superceding the other, UT is perfectly valid as well.


However, this isn't a post about right and wrong, but rather on Universal Agreements.

Recently I was reflecting on certain things people say on forums that seem to resonate with other people. There appear to be, at least within these little nexuses of anonymous spouts of text, certain little quips that just seem "right" and you'd be a fool to argue against the summed logic of the rest of us. Of course, none of us have any idea how to actually carry out our little vignettes of wisdom, but we like to feel smart knowing them anyways. Since I tend to frequent game design forums, here are a few.

• Easy to learn, hard to master. The concept of make it easy for new players to get into the game, and then hook them for the long run via depth of skill required and how the little basic building blocks of the gameplay can interact in amazingly deep ways. Perhaps the universal example is the Japanese game Go, a strategy game with a few simple rules but years of learning to even come close to competency. Similarly, the western Chess is hailed as an example of this tenant. Checkers doesn't have the depth to apply, and many, many other board games fail miserably the easy to learn portion with their giant handbooks of rules. Other claim that StarCraft did this back in the day for strategy games, but from the testimony of plenty of non-RTS players it was a beast to learn anything except mine stuff and build stuff and Attack-Move army. I personally don't feel it fits well the easy to learn tenant.
• Listen to both the competitive and casual players of your community. See my previous post on the disparity and lovely quagmire this brings.
• Make the game fun. Seems like a simple enough tenant, and many indie developers have mentioned that one way to add new features is to test drive it and then ask "was that fun?" However, many seems to forget this little caveat and add needless grind and game lengthening stupidity just so they can claim "70+ hours of gameplay". See how short Portal was? See how awesome that was? Do that more often. See FarCry2 and its fail grind? Don't do that. Also, remember that your idea of "fun" doesn't always mean fun for others, so pick your target audience early and check with it often.
• Realism only without sacrificing gameplay. Seems a little obvious to me, but sometimes people really want things like realistic bullet drop or localized damage or a Senate that could overrule your orders to the populace if the war goes on too long. Sure war is nasty and politics are tricky and if the US President invaded the rest of the world with Pikemen while they had tanks, I'm pretty sure the general populace would impeach the sucker and then send his body parts to the offended nations. However, in a game, we are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of fun. See the Rule of Cool. Sure it's impossible to backflip off of a launching missile, and then grapple to a jet, kick out the pilot, take control of the plane and crash it into a building just before the missile hits the same building and survive, but who cares? IT WAS AWESOME! Realism would have had you dead after the first bullet hit you and then you had to spend 32 years from an embryo to schooling to training just to get back there. To heck with that, I have save points!
• Dividing the Community is Bad. Don't ever put yourself in a position where your community is fragmented and isolated and no way to interact with each other. Even though games like World of Warcraft have several different servers, they also have giant forums where the diverse ideas and epic wins and strategies can be shared. If you let your community fragment you have to work at least twice as hard to maintain it. Plus, once the rift forms, it's nearly impossible to smooth it over. Another example is the skill curve. If there becomes a strong "pub" and "pro" region, and a giant barrier of entry to move up tot he "pro" area, the "pro" area tends to have only a few to join and keep it fresh, and they become insular and detached from the "pubs". "Pubs" then also see no way to easily progress into the "pros" and either stagnate or eventually leave. Slowly and surely your community suffocates.
• Release early, release often. This is actually a surprisingly recent one and perhaps one of the most misused. I believe it has sprung up mostly from the indie development scene, and touted more publicly from developers like the Civilization 4 development team and Mass Effect 2's level design team. The key component is that you want to get feedback as quickly as possible and design in an iterative fashion. That way mistake made in the beginning don't get unnoticed and create huge amount of work later in the development process. However, some developers mistake this to mean "publicly release everything, no matter how awful and unpolished it is." This creates a negative effect. Recall the phrase "negative publicity is still publicity"? Turns out in the gaming world negative publicity kills future publicity. You only have one or two good shots to prove yourself noteworthy before the masses give up and ignore you. So, by releasing half-baked bug-ridden betas to the masses you make the majority of them give up. Until a glowing report appears about how awesome it is from a major trusted reviewer. Instead, you need to slowly release within a controlled environment of peers who will critique and look past the early development flaws and help guide you in the design process.
  
• Make the game fun. It's worth mentioning twice.

In Hindsight: HMC

In hindsight, Harvey Mudd College has both its merits and its flaws.

For those of you new to this whole HMC thing, allow me to summarize its purpose: "Tech school with liberal arts emphasis".

Yeah, yeah, I know there's the whole missions statement that sounds much more official and all, but really that's what it all boils down to. Heck, 1/3 of our courseload is in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (they also get peeved if you leave out one of the 3). We also support coursework rigor on the same level as Caltech and MIT, have insanely huge Senior Projects, and have to take courses in all the disciplines so that we're "well-rounded" in both the technical fields and as an individual.

Overall, I'd say this mission and purpose is right on the money. I'm now doing graduate work at UC Davis and several professors there have also mentioned that "it's not how brilliant you are or how great your ideas are, it's how well you can communicate them to others". Industry members have told us this in seminars. I have anecdotal evidence from a variety of friends, colleagues, and family. Sure being a brilliant solver of the world is awesome, but you can't change the world with a blackboard full of scribbles that only you can decipher. Presentation skills, proper grammar, being able to relate via music and conversations, understanding politics and policy, heck even knowing proper etiquette are all equally vital to being able to thrive as a human being.

So, yeah, HMC rocks in that respect.


Plus, it's a school dedicated to teaching. I didn't realize how important this was until now. As a High School student I heard about it and decided I wanted to go to a place where teaching was a high priority. It sounds really good on paper, and makes logical sense. You're going to school to learn.

I didn't realize how important that was to me until I got to UC Davis.

Let me put it in perspective. At HMC, most professors teach two to three courses a semester and balance in there some research and other activities like sitting on boards, getting seminars organized, hanging out with students, the usual. At UC Davis, if a professor it teaching more than one class they appear to have a breakdown and can't function properly. Assignments tend to have errors or are incoherent. Grades get returned weeks after you turned the assignment in. They realize somewhere around 2/3 through the quarter that they haven't given enough work yet, and so pile it on for the last 1/3. And guess which class gets dropped if they have to pick between the two? The Graduate level class. Ugh....

Because I'm a grad student I have a bit more freedom to pick classes I enjoy and avoid professors who really can't teach. Still, the horror some of the undergrads have to go through is extremely rough. The vast majority of the professors are there to do research and teaching is an afterthought. As a result the quality drops precipitously.

Now, I can understand why the UCD professors can't perform as well as the HMC ones. They have to manage their own research teams, secure funding, wine and dine prospective grant givers and are always worrying about the next paper or fellowship deadline. Plus, your success is measured in the amount of research you can do. More students is good, but it also requires more money to pay them all to do research. At HMC, the professors get a fellowship placed under their name that will stay with them for years and they hand-pick enough students as they can handle. No wonder they can not only get better research (the students are more driven and self-selecting) and they can be better teachers (more time, hired specifically for teaching instead of research).

The difference really does matter. I was able to get help from the professors much more easily at HMC than at UCD. E-mail and office hours were common and frequent. Lectures were concise, well thought-out, and got us ready for the next homework. There was very little waste time so we learned in a semester what the UCD kids learn over the course of a year. Overall it was a much healthier learning environment.

Granted, there were some exceptions to this rule. There were definitely poorly taught HMC courses (and I've talked with the professors about them), and there have been some excellent UCD courses. But the overall trend still stands in my mind.

Of course, more learning means more homework. Ugh. That being said, I'm somehow being equally time eaten at times at UCD. Must be my own masochism.


Perhaps the weakest part of HMC is the lack of involvement. UCD has the monolithic administration, but if you compare HMC to other colleges like USC or Chapman (where my siblings have gone) it does extremely poorly at involving current students, alumni, and the parents.

There is a very strong chance you came to this blog via my older one where I was a blogger for the Admission Department. It was fun, I got to talk about my experiences and josh about the good, the bad, and the weird of HMC. However, as an alumni I've had 2 contacts back to HMC. One is a fairly drab e-mail newsletter that I typically skim then dump, and the other was a phone call that was a thinly veiled excuse to ask for money and keep my contact info up-to-date.

My mom has it even worse. Since we live only 30 minutes from the school, she was an active volunteer for several events and even sat on several panels. Some were for Q&A with prospective parents, and one was for helping decide on a new administrator. However, after the decision was made, she heard nothing for several months. Sure there were complications, but there wasn't even a whisper from the higher ups about what was going on. Even a simple "We're sorry, but complications have arisen" would have been nice to let those that helped with the decision feel like they aren't being ignored and left out of the loop.

HMC needs to exploit it resources. While you're in HMC you're taken very good care of and you develop great bonds with each other and the school. The huge failure of HMC to take advantage of it, even if it's just for the end of getting more money from us, is a real shame. Events need to be planned, information distributed, more ways to hang out and connect with other alums would be a huge boon to keeping an active community. Active community means more stay connected, means more resources to pull on for jobs and careers and networking, and more publicity.

Take a good look at the USC Family. Just flash your USC credentials and suddenly huge doors open up. They look out for each other, they build comradery, they keep in touch and sell you swag. They know how to keep their alums interested and how to get their alums to connect. They look out for each other and for the college. Being a Trojan means Trojans look out for you. It's a shame that even with all this talk about the internet and bootstrapping the social networking media like Facebook, many colleges including HMC aren't taking advantage of it.

They really need a better PR and Alumni/Parent relations team.


Anyways, if I ever had to do it over again, I'd totally pick HMC. Sure there were times I ground myself into a pulp over certain projects, and yeah sometimes there was stupid dorm drama. However, overall, it's an awesome place that has rigor and teaches you how to be relevant in a high-tech intellectual world. And really, that's pure awesome.

Competitive versus Casual

I happen to follow game development quite a bit. One of my most anticipated games is a little gem called Natural Selection 2. It's based off a Half-Life 1 mod called Natural Selection and perhaps is best described as playing StarCraft in first-person inside buildings. It falls into the elusive FPS/RTS hybrid genre where players fight it out in first-person as a team, but the team progresses with technology, map control, and resource harvesting. It has a fairly strong competitive feel since it came from the same era as Counter-Strike where twitch was king, movement was fast and furious, and we had no stinkin' hide-and-heal mechanics.

As a frequenter of the forums there's been a recent surge of Competitive versus Casual argument running through many threads. It's quite the age-old argument and has played out on many other forums as well including the StarCraft2 forums, the Heroes of Newerth Forums, and so on. Basically the argument is as follows:

1. Competitive players feel that their voice should be heard and given more weight, especially for elements like game balance. Note that these tend to be a minority of the total player base, but are the ones who spend the most time exploring the intricate framework of the game to gain every advantage possible.
   
2. Casual players (or those representing them) believe all players have equal voice, especially when it comes to what is fun.

Since NS2 is trying to appease the casual players (easy to learn) AND the competitive players (hard to master), finding the balance point is extremely tricky.

Perhaps the classic clash point has to do with a mechanic called bunnyhopping. Originally a glitch in the game engine, players found that there is no limit to your speed while you are in the air. Also, since turning and strafing tended to give a little extra speed, as long as you minimize time on the ground you could reach speeds up to twice as fast as your ground walking opponents. Not to mention constantly bouncing along makes you a harder target to hit.

This mechanic became a requirement for competitive play of many games, NS1 included. Many competitive players want to keep it in because of its increase to the skill ceiling. It adds a huge amount of mobility depth and a nice learning curve. You can always get better at it, and being better equates directly to better performance.

The more casual crowd abhor it. The main reason is because it feels like a gimmick. In order to learn this trick you have to be taught it, either via research or from a friend. It's a non-intuitive way to gain a huge advantage and the jump in performance from not knowing how to execute the move to executing it was huge. It is perhaps the largest barrier in order to enter higher level play.

Most agree that if there was a way to keep the mobility and dynamic properties of bunnyhopping while removing the barrier to learning it then it would be a worthy mechanic to include. The real question left unanswered is what to use to replace it? And so a few weeks later the arguments start all over with no solution.


Coming back to my original point, who should the game developer listen to? We have an obviously binary choice, bunnyhopping is either in or out, and two camps with strong, and very valid, views.

Remember, the competitive players are small in number, but influence the game community in a huge way. Without a competitive scene, most games dry up due to lack of interest, lack of direction, and lack of publicity. They also may feel a little entitled to acknowledgment since they poured so much time into becoming a pro gamer. Plus, you want competitive players around to keep an eye on balance, to find and report exploits for you, and to help set the tone for strategies. Taking a look at perhaps the most popular strategy game ever StarCraft the fact that US players would regularly watch the Korean leagues to pick up tips, strats, and to be entertained should illustrate just how powerful a vibrant competitive scene is. In real life sports, how well do you think a game like football would do if there wasn't the college league and the NFL to get people pumped up and give role models?

However, also remember the more casual players. There are more of them and they make up the bulk of your playerbase. Having an isolated set of pro gamers only makes it difficult for new players to join in. They join a game, summarily get crushed by all the long time veterans, and summarily leave. Without fresh blood, the community eventually withers and dies. Plus, new gamers are revenue for the company. You want you game to be bought by as many players as possible. Sure some communities live on in the nether regions of the internet surviving solely on a small clump of dedicated players (see many, many examples from the MMO industry) but that should be after a long prosperous period. That shouldn't be your starting point at launch.


Personally, I'll quote myself from the forum to give my view:

Neither the "competitive" players nor the "casual" players should dictate a game like this. They both have merits as well as huge blind spots. Also, this game is not being designed for one at the exclusion of the other (unlike say Farmville).

That being said, there are many parties who should be listened to for specific things and all opinions weighed. Competitive players have a very strong sense of balance, counters, strategic development, and what it takes to keep competitive players interested. Casuals have a stronger idea of a new player's experience, which is what you need to consider when trying to engage new players to join your player base. I for one almost never listen to casual players about balance, they just don't see it the way I do or those I respect do. However, I also listen intently when they talk about the entry barriers or basic gameplay transparency because they're the ones who have trouble with it first hand.


So, in general, no one should be the sole voice for the game. No one should be prematurely excluded. However, certain parties excel at certain things and that should still be taken into account.

Aw, a shiny little compromise.

Too bad the two ends of the spectrum (or at least their vocal representatives) continued for 3 more pages after that jabbering at each other, eventually degrading into insults.