How to use players' emotions

I'm targeting a few game developers with this, but welcome input from anywhere.

Let's say that there's a technology -- a module that you can plug into your projects that allows you to access the internal emotional state of the user of your game. How would your game use that? Any game. Any kind of game. What kinds of games would use it in what ways? Are there ethical considerations? As a designer/developer/whatever, would you like to have access to that extra stream of data? And why?

In email, Patrick Dugan wrote:

I'm currently playing with relationship-focused multiplayer interaction and how imperfect information can balance that out, kinda like what Between did but from a different angle. So naturally I'd like to experiment with making that data known to the other player, as well as leaving it unknown and doing some fancy back-end stuff with it. The easiest thing to do, of course, is leave "traps" for players to express emotional extremes, like a sudden gap-up in a market, and reveal things to their counter-player and to themselves that they may not have been aware of. That's the trick, the cognitive construction of choice matrices is powerful enough to mold behaviors behavior and take metrics on it, you don't need direct B-CIs. Of course, the B-CIs would be useful, but the control grid will come in more subtle forms.

That's good stuff for me. I hadn't been thinking at all about multi-user reveals, only how to manipulate the player with adaptive algorithms.

In email, Craig Perko wrote:

The problem with a question like this is that it's a very unsatisfying
thought experiment. The answers are all too basic and uniform because
the question is too wide-base.

Anyone with an ounce of brain can see that it would allow you to make
better games, and they can imagine up the kinds of ways it can happen
for all the various kinds of games. Anyone with an ounce of brain can
also clearly see the ethical considerations.

In order to be an interesting thought experiment, it has to be about
something more specific, something that requires thought. Something
that ten different designers would come up with ten different answers
for.

But if you really want an answer, okay. I would make games scarier,
more touching, more adrenaline-filled, obviously with an eye to player
health and privacy. You could easily develop a feedback system for
stressing the things that affect them most: if Anna makes them more
happy than Bert, you can show them more Anna, or you can strive to
make Bert more likeable. And, of course, that's a simple intro
example, it can get very complex as you apply it to level design, NPC
scripting, and variations in player capacities for emotion...

The problem is that it's a straight run: everyone will give you more
or less the same answers, perhaps flavored with different levels of
paranoia. I imagine these are the same answers you came up with.

Uh, yeah. What he said is what I'm finding.

There are little exceptions. Patrick's multiplayer thoughts are great. James Brown suggested a Rock Band game where audience appreciation matters to your score -- which is a different, easier kind of multiplayer use. He also suggested using the tech to gauge the effectiveness of product placements. That's neat.

Spore: six hours in

I preordered Spore from Amazon in December of 2007. It arrived yesterday. I'm talking here about my impressions.

OK, first, I have only six hours of play time in on Spore, so really, these are just first impressions. I’ve played through the first three stages and am poised to begin the civilization stage. My review of it, I’ve come to realize as I wrote the below, is unapologetically positive. I realized, of course, that I was having fun playing, but now I realize that I love the game. It has shortcomings – the controls are hard sometimes, but overall, I’m really enthusiastic.

The creature creators – particularly once you get into 3D (i.e. everything after the cellular stage) are really fun to just mess with. There are game-play repercussions to the choices of what you attach and where, but even without that, just seeing what you can do is awesome fun. In the end – regardless of how Spore lives up to expectations and hype, just the creative acts alone will make it worth $50 if I honestly appraise things (time and money).

At each stage, so far, the game-play changes significantly. It both gets more complex as you advance and also changes how you accomplish things. I’m playing an herbivore and that informs the choices I have throughout play.

In the beginning I was just hunting bits of green stuff and trying to avoid being prey. The way you grow and level (up through strata of the tide pool? down? Or maybe just in that you’re aware of things at a different scale but in the same space?) is a nice gimmick and the play remains the same but the graphics are rich enough that even though there’s not much to it, it’s fun and rewarding just playing the light game and looking around.

When you advance from one stage to the next, you are presented with a history of your development which focuses on what all you accomplished during the last stage but includes the whole history. It’s fun. Just looking at how your body has morphed at each “generation” is kind of neat – particularly since you remember back to how you were making decisions.

When you crawl out of the sea, new parts – arms and legs most obviously, become available. And you gain a third dimension. You can fight or befriend other nests of critters and you have some basic missions to fulfill to gain DNA points (or whatever – the currency that allows you to alter your form). And you can (and must, I think) build a pack of companions that will help you make friends or eat foes. I stumbled upon gliding wings and found that increasing my flight ability made it fast and fun to get around (and out of danger) in this stage. This is also the first area where maneuvering with the WASD keys was hard. Turning is something I still haven’t mastered. The mouse-look doesn’t work like it ought, I think.

This brings me to another realization about Spore. They give you enough guidance to steer you along the right path, but really figuring out how to play has enough holes in it that you’re figuring stuff out. (Now that I think about it, maybe the manual tells more – maybe even too much, I dunno, I only read the first page.) But, so far at least, the figuring out is nicely in what Vygotsky called my Zone of Proximal Development – which means that the learning task is stimulating and not discouraging.

In the third stage your form is fixed and the creator aspect of play involves dressing your tribe; designing their costume. It’s quite fun. The game play was pretty dull real-time strategy play. Harvest food, domesticate pets – though I’m not sure how to use them yet, make babies, outfit your tribe and assign them tools – that sort of thing. And then you can either impress and ally with other tribes or destroy them. I think your strategy at the beginning of this stage depends on what tools you start with. If not, that kind of sucks, but oh well. I befriended two and destroyed three – even with the intent to follow as pacific a course as I could. Destroying enemies is hardish. If you want to figure everything out for yourself, skip the rest of the paragraph.............The strategy that I settled on was to equip my entire tribe with burning torches and just attack their main building. You get slaughtered but suck up tons of their resources. You want to have built up a food supply first because as you die, you’re laying more eggs. Probably you got wiped out, but reproduced faster than them. So now, you outfit the tribe similarly and repeat the attack. This time you win. I actually hope it’s not as formulaic as all that, but it worked like that for me on my first game.

That’s about all I can think of to say just now. I’m having fun with it.

MMO class design: reaching balance

I just read the article at Gamasutra, MMO Class Design: Up With Hybrids! An Economic Argument in which the author analogizes the ecology of classes and player-competition within that to several economic factors. It was a good read. And it struck me that it would be really, really easy to provide one kind of balance to the class ecology by simply applying a reward multiplier (maybe just on XP if that's how your game rolls) based on nothing but the popularity of the class. If everyone detects that the fire/fire tank in CoH is uber and picks that, they might choose something else when they realize that the invul/mace tank earns xp at a rate 1.5 times as fast as the fire/fire. Right? And you could have that dynamically tuned as a weighted average based on the previous week on in-game play time or something. Then, barring stupendous gaffes in design which you've hopefully caught in testing, you can just completely avoid pissing people off when you nerf their class.

Is any game doing this? Why not?

Metaplace dev blog fundaments #2 response

So, I'm trying to grok game design. I've been reading RPG theory off and on for five years at the Forge and diaspora sites. I read stuff written by board game designers off and on and I know several of them in person. And recently, I've been reading computer game design stuff. Several blogs -- you can see some of them in my sidebar at the right. I'm in line to buy Raph Koster's book pretty soon. And I'm watching his new project, Metaplace eagerly.

This morning I read part two in a series of game design fundamentals on the Metaplace developer's blog written by Raph and I thought about it and did some background reading and then posted some questions to the Metaplace forum.

I'm writing this mostly to myself -- under the assumption that no one is reading this. :) If that's not the case, feel free to respond to me either here or at the Metaplace forum. Here's what I wrote:

Do you have to prepare for the challenge?
…where prep includes prior moves? …and you can prep in multiple ways?

Does the topology of the space matter?
…does the topology change?

Is there a core verb for the challenge?
…can it be modified by content?

Can you use different abilities on it?
…will you have to in order to succeed?

Is there skill to using the ability?
…or is this a basic UI action?

Are there multiple success states?
…with no bottomfeeding? …and a cost to failure?

You have to answer yes to all of these for your game atom to be fun. And yes, we mean every atom in the game has to meet these criteria.

There's a lot of this that I think I get, but could be wrong. There's some of it that I just don't. First, I'm just going to ask some questions and then I'm going to try to analyze something using this framework.

Are 'atom' and 'challenge' synonomous to the extent that they bear a one to one relationship?

I sort of understand the basics of mathematical topology -- is that what we're talking about? Or is it being used more generically to suggest some kind of state change? Does the opening move of a Chess pawn change the topology of the board? And is it because of the seperation of the front of pieces or because it changes the way in which the next player can engage the situation? What is the topological significance of the fact that that pawn's move is not reversable? Any? Or does topology in this sense only care about loci of in-game actions and how they're connected?

I'm pawing through Raph's blog archive looking for game grammar stuff to understand core verbs. I found this presentation there (which helps me with topology a bit, too). So I see that e.g. Chess pieces are verbs. Cool. I get that. But uh, "each has associated topology?" Does that merely mean that each verb potentially interacts with a different subset of the game's topology and acts differently (rooks travel from node to node on different paths than do bishops) or is it something more essoteric? Also, what's the significance of a core verb? Am I right in expecting that many atoms will use several verbs?

Are abilites verbs? Is the following true: skills belong to the player and abilites belong to the game (or the player's presence in the game).

What's bottomfeeding?

Then I think that Raph's saying every atom should answer yes to each of those questions. But I think that's impossible and even inconsistent with stuff like "fundamental atoms will be ones demanding no skill, providing no risk of failure" from that same link above. So what is really meant regarding the scope of the application of these questions? Also, how fun is fun enough? How do you account for niche games where people obviously think it's fun but lots of others do not? Are you saying that at whatever the appropriate scope is, failure to meet the above criteria will result in a game that isn't fun for (almost) anyone? (This is what I'm guessing.)

I think I understand atoms. They occupy many different scopes/scales. Double-clicking the armor in a vendor's shop to tell the game that you're buying it is an atom, right? Maybe a "fundamental" atom? Also, the game of knowing which armors work well against what opponents is an atom. Right (I'm less sure about that one)?

So in the case of just using the mouse to buy the armor: Are you getting yes or no to those questions? Are you preparing for the double-click by looking at the screen and figuring out what coords to settle on? And I'm not sure on sophisticated topologies in examples like this -- are there nodes, per se involved? I guess there must be but it's awfully big to grasp. What's the core verb and how can it possibly change? What's the challenge even? What is an ability at this scale? Are multiple in use during this purchase? And I think there's only one success state unless I'm more confused than I'd have guessed. Is the cost of failure the quarter second to redo the double-click?

But it all seems easier in the bigger atom (where analysis should be much harder): There are lots of preparations -- gathering knowledge through experimentation or social means. I guess topology is turning out to be the hard thing for me. Topology must matter in as much as it effects e.g. information gathering, access to armors and enemies using various damage types, etc. But where the information exists in the player's head (or notes) I don't see how it can change the topology (unless we claim that topology can extend out of the game -- which might be useful, but I'm unprepared for. :-). Is the core verb combat or social networking or the avatar or something else entirely? You can, and possibly must, use different abilities to get a complete understanding (the way I'm envisioning things). There are definately skills involved in this kind of analysis. I'd say that there are a very large number of success states if there are even several armor and damage types in this game as incomplete understanding can result in nearly infinite states of grasp. And certainly there are costs of failure even if they are transparent to the players prior to their realization that this atom/game exists.

So, I think the first atom can't be fun but can be necessary to a fun game. The second atom, if sufficiently large, is quite likely to be fun (if not crazy-fun).

Are these analyses along the lines of what the article is suggesting?

thanks a ton,

Chris