Balance of Power - Crawford 1986

Notes from Balance of Power, a book by Chris Crawford published in 1986.

Games vs simulations

Games differ from simulations in three ways. First, games carry an artistic message, with unquantifiable concepts and feelings. Second, games simplify reality: they only keep the conflicts inherent in the situation, and unlike in real life, they provide clear and emotionally satisfying resolutions to those conflicts. Yet games maintain a level of realism appropriate to the audience. Finally, games are accessible; there is no need to study the manual.

Balance of power, in short

The player controls one of the two superpowers, the USA or the USSR, during the Cold War. Each turn, both superpowers send money, weapons, troops, or diplomatic pressure onto other countries to trigger insurgencies, coups d'etat, or Finlandization favorable to them. For example, the USSR can send money to Cuba.

If a superpower contest the actions taken by the other superpower, then a crisis testing the player's brinksmanship follows. Either the player stands firm on its ground (whether s/he was contesting or not), and brings the crisis one DEFCON level higher, ie one step closer to World War III and a nuclear holocaust, or s/he pulls back. For example, think about the Cuba missile crisis of 1962.

When a superpower stands firm and wins the crisis, it gains prestige points. A minor country such as Nicaragua is worth 2 points, while a country like East Germany is worth 200 points. The further down in a crisis a superpower backs down, the more it loses prestige. When the highest DEFCON level is reached, the game is lost for both players.

The game ends after eight turns. The superpower with most prestige points win.

Balance of insurgencies

Insurgencies consist of rebels trying to take over the government of a minor country. The strength of any armed faction is measured from its number of soldiers and its number of weapons. If 100 government forces share 1 weapon, then the government's power should be low, and a superpower providing a couple weapons would really increase its strength. Similarly, 1 government force with 100 weapons should be weak. Thus, the strength of an armed faction is the harmonic mean of the number of soldiers and the number of weapons. It is optimal when each soldier has a weapon.

Balance of crises

Nastiness is a game-wide variable; it describes how slippery taking actions in the world has become. When nastiness is high, the AI is more likely to contest the player's actions, start crises, and refuse to back down. Nastiness increases after each crisis or military intervention of a superpower, and decreases slowly every turn.

Pugnacity is a superpower variable; it describes how trustworthy the superpower is considered by minor countries. Pugnacity increases when the superpower is aggressive and wins crises, and decreases when a superpower backs down in crises. If a superpower backs down late in a crisis, it loses a lot of pugnacity.

Combined, nastiness and pugnacity amplify the amplitude of missteps; an error in judgement can cause the end of the game. This is exactly what Crawford was trying to convey about brinksmanship.

Agile game dev (1/5) - Keith 2010

Agile game development with Scrum, Clinton Keith, 2010

Part I - Problem and solution

Read the series: 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, and 5/5.

Problems

In the 70s, arcade hardware was expensive, so developers iterated on the software and shipped when high quality. In the 80s, hardware became cheaper, so everyone could ship games without too much investment. Quality consequently decreased. But as games increased in complexity, teams started to require specialists (artists, composers, network engineers), and the software costs exploded. This led to the hit-or-miss strategy: invest only a few man-years in developing a game, ship, and hope for success. Hopefully, one hit would pay for many failures.
Problem #1: the number of man-years (and costs) to make AAA games doubles every 5 years, but the market isn't growing as fast. Moreover, only 25% of the revenues will go to the developer; the rest goes in distribution, marketing, publishing, and licensing fees.
Problem #2: only 20% of games released generate profits, so risk-averse publishers prefer sequels of existing IPs than risky innovation. Yet it is innovation that drives the game industry.

You can only know if your game is fun by play-testing it. Since design, art, and tech requirements emerge as the game is developed and play-tested, waterfall is not appropriate, and maintaining a detailed documentation too time-consuming.
Problem #3: how do stakeholders (developers, publisher, IP owner, studio management, etc.) communicate?

Traditional game development is made of 4 steps: concept, pre-production (aka pre-prod), production, and post-production. Of particular interest are pre-prod and prod. Pre-prod is exploratory, and aims at figuring out the basic mechanics for the game to be fun. Pre-prod can follow a kill-gate model, where several prototypes are started to explore ideas in parallel, and the least promising are "killed" every few months. In production, levels and assets are mass-produced.
Problem #4: how to predict the schedule, budget, and amount of new content to produce from the basics found in pre-prod? Moreover, milestones defined in contracts with publishers prevent developers from adding good features at the last moment, and prevent publishers to ask for new features too. How to accommodate everyone?

Introducing agile game development

Agile is not a silver bullet. It only makes the development process transparent: problems will become obvious, but they still have to be solved. Agile aims at improving communication between the stakeholders: publisher, developers, IP owner, studio management, and so on.

Sprints: Agile game development is iterative. At the lowest level of granularity, an inter-disciplinary team of developers designs, implements, and polishes features during iterations of 2-4 weeks called sprints.

User stories are the agile way to present features so that they communicate value/fun to the stakeholders. For example: "As a player, I want to see enemies react when shot."

Releases: At the highest level of granularity, releases of the game are delivered every 4-8 sprints (2-4 months). Releases focus on major goals such as "online gameplay".

Backlogs: Communication within the team happens through a sprint backlog, and between the team and the stakeholders through a product backlog. User stories are moved up or down the backlogs by the product owner, representing the stakeholders in the studio.

Sport design

[This article follows an email discussion with Ian Schreiber.]

Sports and video games share a lot. Although video games have implemented new sports, they are usually copies of real-life sports (Madden NFL, FIFA) or variants with more violent creatures or rules (Mutant League Football, Blood Bowl). Even fighting games come from fighting sports - Street Fighter is nothing more than mixed martial arts with fireballs and teleportation. However, video games such as DDR or exergaming (Wii Fit) get really close to actual sports. Several new sports make use of computers (ARGs), some use the geography (Big Urban Games) and some use both (geocaching, Four Square.

Yet there are currently many more board game and video game designers than sport designers. Possible reasons:

• New sports take time to spread and be widely adopted. Rugby was presumably invented by Web Ellis in 1823 (as a variant from normal football), but it took around a century to become popular.
• Sport rules get modified over time to fit people's needs and likes, or to improve players' safety or game balance. Hence, a sport might have been designed and redesigned by many people, and not a single designer.
• There are more constraints in sport design than game design. To spread, a sport has to be fun to play AND fun to watch (that's why ball games have only one ball: it's easier for the audience to focus on it). It also has to be easily played at home or on the street in the neighborhood (like soccer but unlike ice hockey) and it has to be safe for people.
• There might not be a strong demand for new sports.

Video games do not suffer from the problems mentioned above (they are at home, they have marketing backup, and people want ot play computer games). Yet game designers do not try to incorporate new sports in their games. Do they simply not think about it? I think there is a lot for video games to gain from sports, especially since many games have very competitive player segments (WoW world firsts, Korean Starcraft league, Street Fighter IV world tournaments, ...).

[Literature] Characterizing and Understanding Game Reviews

In Characterizing and Understanding Game Reviews, Zagal et al. give the most salient features and qualities that game reviews have. See the table below for the feature list. They analyzed 120 reviews from 2006 on IGN and Gamespot.

Theme	Description
Description	What you need to do to play this game as well as its features, modes, and characteristics.
Personal Experience	Emotions felt due to the game (during or after play. Also includes technical problems experienced.
Reader Advice	Recommendations, strategies for success and enjoyment of game as well as discussion of the skills or abilities necessary to play this game.
Design Suggestions	Discussion of features that are missing or lacking or suggestions for future improvement of game.
Media Context	Contextualization of game with respect to non-game media properties from film, books, TV shows, comic books, and so on.
Game Context	Contextualization of the game with respect to other games, game genres and their conventions as well as the history of games in general.
Technology	Affordances and role of hardware on which game runs. Includes discussion of the controllers used or other capabilities.
Design Hypotheses	Design Goals that developers/designers had for the game
Industry	Discussion of state, issues, or trends of the games industry as a whole.

Zagal et al. also identified other interesting facts about game reviews. For instance, game journalists assumed game developers read their reviews because they sometimes were directly addressing the creators of the game. Maybe reviewers realize they arguably played many more games than most game developers and may thus know more about the medium. Some reviews also commented on company business models.
Reviews also help preserve videogame history because they embed the historical context during which the game was published.

However, reviews had certain flaws. First, discussions pertaining to the methods and means through which game reviews are conducted were missing from reviews. Second, Zagal argued that students taking videogame-related classes might have difficulties expressing ideas about gameplay or articulating their experience with games because most of what students read about games are videogame reviews, and that they are thus generally lacking in models of what in-depth analysis or critique about games look like. Third, reviews commonly assume that the reader is familiar with other videogames and their genre conventions, but they were not providing details as to what those conventions refer to or mean. This could make game reviews inaccessible to the most casual readers. Should game reviews be targeted to fans only? Or could they actually be helping the inexperienced readers in providing references to other video games? Fourth, Dang argued reviewers focus too much on the (lack of) innovation of a game compared to other games (Dang, A. (2006). "The 5 Problems with Videogame Journalism." Retrieved Dec 11, 2008, from http://firingsquad.com/features/problems_with_video_game_journalism/). Zagal thinks the innovation bias is rather a feature of the medium of videogames. Movie sequels don't "improve" on the original. Games do, for the most part.

Video games birth - 2/2

This article is the second part of the origins of video games. Here, I detail the 1965 - 1977 period relatively to arcade, console and mainframe video games. Many more games than those I mention have been published in this period. However, I try to mention only the ones I find the most interesting and innovative in each of the arcade, console and mainframe video game fields.

Arcade video games

The first arcade games were coin-operated. Arcade controllers were very similar to the 1960's controllers: each player had a knob and a few buttons.

Galaxy Game was released in 1971. I could not find any screenshot or video of it. Computer Space was released two months after Galaxy Game in 1971. The video of the game shows how similar it was to Spacewar! from 1961. Both Galaxy Game and Computer Space were 2D space shooters. In 10 years, not much had evolved, but the shmup genre was certainly defined. I think the Cold War space race context influenced a lot the design of video games. Anyway, Pong was published by Atari in 1972. The video game sport genre began.

Gun Fight was published in 1975. Each of the two players controls a cowboy and shoots at the other. Unlike Spacewar! or the other shmups, bullets are limited in number and bounce against the screen. I could find a few screenshots of Gran Trak 10, the first racing game released in 1974. Gran Trak used ROM to store the game data. People played versus an AI. The player could use a steering wheel, two foot pedals, a gear shifter and a knob. Sprint 2 was a racing game published in 1976. This arcade game added two AI cars and more diverse tracks, but the controller stayed the same as Gran Trak 10. Night Driver, a racing arcade game released in 1976, was the first game to show the world in a first-person view. As seen at the end of this video, the speed of the car increases gradually to make the game more difficult for the player.

Breakout was released in May 1976. You can see the video of its port to the VCS 2600. In the original gameplay, orange blocks speed the ball. Each level increases the speed of the ball and the difficulty of the game.

Home consoles

Before 1977, many home consoles embedded the games inside the hardware - few consoles used ROM cartridge. So it makes sense to analyze the consoles as a whole. I found many information about first-gen consoles in this article.

Magnavox Odissey was the first home console. It was released in 1972 and did not use cartridge (the 1978 upgrade of Odissey has cartridges). Odyssey 200 was a 1975 upgrade of the original Odissey console. It contained three built-in variations of Pong.

Pong was ported from arcade to home in 1975 in the "Atari Pong" home console. This console had the game built-in (there was no cartridge). It took a year for Atari to find a retailer interested in funding the fabrication of the home console. Pong was nevertheless a success on Christmas 1975. In June 1976, Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari for patent infringement. Like the Pong console, the APF TV Fun released in 1976 had a monaural sound channel. Like Pong, the APF TV Fun had two knobs and several buttons. Four games were built-in: tennis, hockey, squash and single handball.

The Coleco Telstar was a first-gen console series starting in 1976. Its games were built-in Pong variants (hockey, handball, tennis and Basque Pelota) as well as Pinball games. Some 1978 upgrades had sound and games in color. One of the Telstar upgrades had text in French and English for the Canadian market.
The Color TV Game was a series of Nintendo consoles released in Japan only. Although second-generation consoles started to appear in the US around 1977, I think the Japanese market was at that time out of American console makers' reach. The CTG15 had the first controllers linked by a cable to the console, making the play experience more enjoyable. Games were built-in. Some were based on Atari's successes such as Pong or Breakout, but there was also a racing game.

Mainframes

There are several Mainframe games mentioned at wikipedia. I am sure some games are missing or have been forgotten since the 1970's. The mouse had been invented in 1963 and the ball mouse in 1972. Hence players could already use a mouse and a keyboard to play mainframe games on terminals.
These slides from Pamela Fox provided a lot of information (and screenshots).

PDP-10

PDP-10 games nearly always relied on text-based UI for the input and output. Sometimes, the possible player actions or game feedback were printed (on paper, at 10 or 30 characters per second). Lunar Lander appeared in 1969 (on PDP-8). It was apparently textual (I could not find any screenshot) and was ported to a graphic terminal of PDP-10 in 1973. The company who made the graphic terminal commissioned the game to be written in 1973 as a demonstration of the capabilities of the terminal. The user input was taken from a light pen. Starting in 1971, Don Daglow wrote several games during his college years. Baseball was coded in 1971. No screenshots or videos were found. Then Star Trek in 1972 and Dungeon in 1975. Dungeon was the first RPG and it was multiplayer. Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply, Adventure) was an adventure game created in 1976. The game shows both recreational and educative elements.

PLATO

The TUTOR language was introduced in 1967 for PLATO III. TUTOR made it possible to code PLATO games. The third slide of How College Students Influenced Gaming shows a quite exhaustive timeline of the PLATO games. Users had only a keyboard - no mouse - to interact with a PLATO terminal.

pedit5 was coded in 1974. It was the first dungeon crawler game and it was using some of the Dungeon and Dragon rules. The name of the game, pedit5, was deliberately misleading in order to hide it from administrators who had forbidden them. Following the same naming strategy, another dungeon crawler called m199h was coded in 1974 (and deleted). dnd was allowed to stay on the PLATO mainframe by system administrators in 1975. Before that, at least 7 major versions of dnd [...] were deleted from the PLATO system for being illicit games on computer system designed solely for education. In dnd players could buy items from vendors and face the first boss monster of video games (a dragon).

Empire appeared in 1973. The game was accepted by mainframe administrators because it was part of a class work. Up to 30 players could play the same game of Empire "online". It has been upgraded regularly until 1980. The game looks a lot like Spacewar! - spaceships attacking each other. Nevertheless, the game mechanics were more complex as teams could use spaceships with different characteristics ("strong but slow" versus "weak but fast"), and spaceships had two different weapons on-board.

Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked space shooter coded in 1974 and inspired by Star-Trek (and previously mentioned PLATO game Empire). In Panther (1975) players were driving tanks. The terrain in Panther was generated randomly.

Other mainframes

Several other important games were released on other mainframes than PDP-10 and PLATO. Highnoon was written in BASIC in 1970. You can play its emulation. Hunt the Wumpus was coded in 1972 also in BASIC. It was a text-based maze adventure game. Later implementations had graphics (see this video) but the first version of the game was totally textual. Maze War was done in 1974. Two players (connected by an Ethernet cable) wandered in a 3D maze and tried to shoot at each other. It was the first FPS (see the gameplay on a Xerox machine). The Oregon trail was released in 1974 as well. The goal of the game was to teach children about the 19th century pioneer life. In fact, the gameplay is mostly about resource management.

Video games birth - 1/2

The quite thorough history of video games given in this article starts with the first video games in the late 1940's and ends in 1977. 1977 is a pivotal year for three reasons. First, second generation consoles appeared - with cartridges! Second, the Golden age of arcade video games started. Third, the home computer entered the market. The simultaneous improvements made in these three different hardwares definitely triggered the adoption of video games in our modern society.

It makes sense to analyze the gameplay and graphics of early video games separately. Gameplay and graphics certainly limit, extend or complement each other. However I think the progress made in each of them were made independently. Video game graphics did not improve thanks to gameplay innovations. New gameplays did not appear specifically because developers/researchers found new ways to display objects on a screen. Looking at the controllers also helps to understand which physical affordances the players could have.

1945 - 1965: Origins

The first video games were, like the first movies, technological proofs of concepts. They relied on electronical/electrical engineering prowesses of the time. One could argue that these games were more about cathode ray tube hacks than proper computer logic and graphics. Wikipedia mentions the 1947 Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device and the 1951 Nimrod as precursors of video games.

OXO (1952) was the first video game, according to students from CMU. It was a version of tic-tac-toe and was only playable on the Cambridge University EDSAC computer. This video shows how the game can be played in an EDSAC emulator. One can measure how clumsy the use of a rotary telephone controller was: the player had to dial the number of the location where he/she wanted to put his/her symbol instead of simply pointing at the location on the screen.

Tennis for two (1958) is a two-player tennis game on oscilloscope. The physicist Higinbotham, creator of the game, reported: I knew from past visitors days that people were not much interested in static exhibits, so for that year. I came up with an idea for a hands-on display – a video tennis game. A video of two people playing the game shows basic elements of gameplay. Around 0:40, the right player seems to dominate the player on the left. The game was only playable on the Brookhaven National Laboratory device, hence hundreds of people lined up to play “Tennis for Two”. For each player, the controller consisted of a knob (for the direction) and a button (to hit the ball).

Other games followed, all developed in universities or by true hackers and which platform were university computers. Examples are Mouse in the Maze (1959), Spacewar! (1962) or the PLATO platform (early 1960's).

The second part of the early video game history deals with mainframes, arcade and consoles.

Comparing video games to films - 2/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

The game industry has been buzzing a lot about the Citizen Kane of games. Because Citizen Kane was released in 1941, the history given here stops in 1941. Although Citizen Kane is a drama film, I have chosen to study the gothic horror genre history. I simply enjoy more watching old monster movies than old drama movies. I think the technical and conceptual improvements observed in the monster movie genre can be generalized to the overall film industry.

Silent films

Silent films (as art pieces and not simply proof-of-concepts) emerged in the 1890's. 1890's movies lasted in general less than 3 minutes (although Jeanne d'Arc by Méliès in 1899 was 10-minute long). Monster movies of the early 20th century were often inspired by novels. Translated into today's game jargon, this means they did not create any original IP. But there were several smart features and prowesses. To my mind, these early prowesses are characteristic of art. For instance, silent films had no spoken dialogs or sound effects but only a background music. The stories featured young heroes in love, a main bad guy, suspense, fear and even an awareness of the audience: the dialog slides stay long enough for everyone to have enough time to read them.

Frankenstein in 1910 lasted approximately 12 minutes and was shot in three days, which was a little longer than usual. Interesting techniques are already used. Around 7:40, for example, the scene takes place in the room of Frankenstein. On the left, a chair and a table where Frankenstein sits. On the right, a mirror pointing towards the entrance of the room. Thanks to the mirror, the spectator is the first to see the monster entering the room. This scene is also the time when the monster sees himself in a mirror and despises his creator for his ugliness. Positioning the mirror this way (presumably tried to) put the spectator in the place of the monster. This mirror play is actually repeated later in the movie (11:20) to bring dramatic effects. When looking in the mirror, Frankenstein sees his evil creation instead of his own image. Interestingly, this mirror effect is often used in Citizen Kane ...

Nosferatu was realized in 1922 and lasts 94 minutes. Some kind of special effects happen, such as around 1:01 when Nosferatu disappears inside the barn, the shadow projection of Nosferatu at 1:19, or Nosferatu's death at 1:22. The film conveys an atmosphere. One could argue that Frankenstein (1910) mentioned above was a simple theater play recorded thanks to a film camera. Nosferatu is unarguably a movie, and it represents well the Gothic horror movie genre.

Sound films

Sound films were invented in 1900, but they started to be seen commercially only in the late 1920's. Thanks to sound films, musical films could emerge as a movie genre. Sound films also gave voice to actors. This additional task meant actors could be in trouble if they could not perform well vocally. I could not check the source personally, but actors such as Anny Ondra in Blackmail (1929) have experienced contrasting consequences of these technologies. She had a lot of success in the Hollywood silent movies, but her Czech accent was felt unsuitable for the film. But let us go back to Gothic horror movies...

Unlike the 1910 Frankenstein, the 1931 Frankenstein's story did not follow the original novel. In the novel, the monster is smart, able to speak and only starts to be violent when his creator refuses to create a wife for him. Frankenstein is a student and has worked alone on his creature. How Frankenstein makes his creature is not mentioned explicitly. In the 1931 movie, a limping assistant helps Frankenstein, now professor, to make his creature. The spectator watches Frankenstein collecting dead flesh from graves and giving birth to the monster electrically using thunder. The monster is completely mute except for grunts and growls and his violence comes from the "criminal brain" that was used to make him. Undoubtedly, the 1931 Frankenstein sound movie convey the creature growls more efficiently than the 1910 version. However, the actor roles have been oversimplified, maybe to reach a more mainstream audience?

Dracula (1931) is considered as a classic of the era and of its genre. Bela Lugosi, playing Dracula, seems to have been instrumental in the film success. Although the audience can hear the actors' voices and sound effects, there is no background music (except during the credits). Other films of 1931 such as the Bollywood Alam Ara used songs extensively. Hence, it becomes clear that not all technical features available at the time were being used in Dracula. Hence, the movie's success had, apparently, not much to do with technological improvements. The special effects stay relatively minor. For instance, the transformation of Dracula into a bat is always done off screen, there is no smoke effect. Considering Nosferatu had special effects a decade before, this lack of special effects in Dracula might have been disappointing for the audience.

Read the third part.