M.I.L.O.

It's a new game, direct from our brains to your browser! Help M.I.L.O. upgrade his little friends the spider bots and use them to get through a building that's a lot more dangerous than it should be. And why is that?

Well... maybe you can find out.

Play now at MildlyIntelligent.com

Fans of our Cyphers ARGs, or ARGs in general, will want to check this out as well.

We also like feedback. Mildlyintelligent.com has a forum. Go there and speak your mind. Tell us what you think? This is the start of something big, and we want your feedback so we can make it the best it can be!

While at the GDC I had the supreme pleasure to play some of the excellent independent games on display at the Independent Games Festival. If I had to sum up what I saw in one word, that word would be “Delightful.”

If they were cakes, I would call them “toothsome.”

However, since we all know now that the cake is a lie, I’ll just highlight two of them that I enjoyed the most, that made me say “Wow, how can an ARG do this?”

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My father is a sculptor and so several times as a child I found myself in art exhibitions. You learn a great many things when you are a child in an art gallery. You learn to keep your hands to yourself and you learn a great deal about human anatomy.

It was like living inside an alternate reality: here we have our normal cities and towns, our normal every day people. Then, every once in a while we’d travel to these strange buildings where normal looking people put their psyches in physical form and put that out for the world to see.

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I ran across a great comment about the difficulties of running an ARG inside World of Warcraft (WoW). The blog entry connected to it was Raph Koster (designer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and now Metaplace) noticing Christy Dena's amazing collection of ARG stats. Raph pointed to the stats and then wondered why ARGs and MMOs aren't partnering more.

The comment itself talks about the difficulties the author had running an ARG in WoW. Some of the criticisms are about the structure of WoW and could be helped by using a more free-form structure like that offered by Second Life. What struck me was that server size was a real problem for them. Since the game world is broken up across servers (and in any case is a subset of Internet users), it can be difficult to get enough people playing the ARG.

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We've been discussing the topic of cheating here in the Cypherdrome lately. How to prevent it, can it even happen in ARGs, etc. The fruits of these discussions will no doubt get their own post in a week or two, but in a twist of synchronicity, I recently came across the Scrabble for Cheaters charity.

Bascially, teams sign up to compete. Whenever anybody donates money in their team's name, they get more opportunities to "cheat" during play. Cheats range from swapping letters out ($25) to inventing new words ($500!)

This combines gameplay and fundraising in a great way. By using elements of the forbidden (we get to cheat!) along with providing an emotional connection to who wins the tournament (I'm helping them!), they've really hit a great formula.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I read the book "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness" by Elyn R. Sacks. Ian grabbed it from the library because of its cool cover and its reference to a W. B. Yeats poem.

Turns out it was a very good choice.

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Super Mario Galaxy (SMG) isn’t a casual game, but it uses a lot of casual game strategies to make it addictive. While the basic mechanics are more involved than your average casual game, they’re surrounding by a host of tricks that casual games use to keep people coming back: level selection, variety, a mixture of short- and long-term goals, high scores, and visceral rewards.

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Ever a few years behind the times, I finally got a computer that the interactive fiction thing "Façade" can run on. This program is as close as anyone has gotten to "a story that reacts to your actions."

It’s an interesting concept, which boils down to "You visit your two friends at their apartment. You can walk around the room and talk to them. Sometime during this they will have a massive break down and you must try to talk them out of it… or make it worse by insulting them."

It works via natural language parsing and it’s the best NLP that I’ve seen, but it still doesn’t work that well. You type your text in and they react, but half the time the two characters thought I was talking to the wrong one, or they just wouldn’t understand what I was saying. Or they’d react with "That really helps us right now" without giving me the feeling that they’d actually understood me.

The whole thing feels more natural than a conversation tree but hurts as a game because I never felt like my actions in the world did all that much. Mostly I stood around and sipped my drink while two people sniped at each other. It was uncomfortable to listen to, so they have that realism down.

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This is a continuation of "Screaming in the Mountains, Part 1"

The designers of Eldritch Errors have said that one of the things they can always count on is Human Nature. It let them get the online community riled up and working at cross-purposes to the campers all while believing they were doing the Right Thing. It was very cleverly done. But while I was there, I learned that while macro level group reactions are important to think about, the behavior of individuals become more and more important the smaller your group is. With only five people, our group was pretty small. Here are some of the things I learned about hosting a live event:

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Our latest game has just been released! San·go, which means 3·5 in Japanese, is a challenging word-creation puzzler. If you're looking for something a little more cerebral than Entropic Space, this is just the thing. It's generally pretty easy to get 20 points on any puzzle. For a bigger challenge, try to beat the high scores shown. Some of them are pretty impressive!

Play San·go!

When I look back at the board games I played in my childhood, Monopoly stands out. Compared to games like Mouse Trap, Scattergories, and even Scrabble, Monopoly is much more complicated, takes longer, and requires more thinking (at least in terms of math and strategy). European board games are often similarly complicated, but in the US, family games tend to be simple and fast. So how did Monopoly get to be such a popular game?

The title of Philip Orbanes' Monopoly: the World's Most Famous Game—and how it got that way indicated that it would hold the answer. And there's definitely a lot of interesting material there, especially about the early days of the game. Unfortunately, most of the history of Monopoly had to be pieced together from patent filings, court cases, and the memories of early Parker Brothers' employees, so there's a lot of detail missing.

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The weekend before Halloween, I attended a live event in the mountains of West Virginia for the alternate reality game Eldritch Errors. This event was the culmination of Book 2 of Eldritch Errors, titled "Scream in the Mountains," which took place over the month of October.

Almost the whole of chapter two was dedicated to building up the importance of "The Feast," an event held in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone where players could go and meet several of the main characters in person.

It's not often a designer gets to attend a major live event for another game, so I have quite a lot to say about it (as evidenced by the "Part 1" up in the title). In this part, I'll talk about the things I loved about the experience.

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How do you keep people from getting bored with your game?

From Donald Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things:

First, the object must be rich and complex, one that gives rise to a never-ending interplay among the elements. Second, the viewer must be able to take the time to study, analyze, and consider such rich interplay; otherwise the scene becomes commonplace. If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver.

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Video games are often about shooting things because that is an easy mechanic to implement. You make a bullet appear in your world, have it travel across the board, and see if it hits anything. Or, you point the “gun” at an alien, draw an imaginary line between the gun and that alien. If the line touches that alien, pow! Fire off the gruesome death animations and cue the visceral sound.

Guns are often easy to create and fun for the player to shoot off, that’s why we see a lot of shooter games out there. I play a lot of games with guns in them, so I have little to no standing to say that games with guns are bad.

I myself do not design games with guns. I believe in the power of alternatives.

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Currently, I see ARGs (and games in generally) designed for three categories: education, marketing, and entertainment. Educational games tend to be relatively local and small, so they get less attention than the other types. Nevertheless, they're out there. When people talk about games, they sound as if they believe there's a vast gulf between these categories. I often hear comments like "I looked into GAME, but it's really just there to sell PRODUCT," "what's the point of GAME?" and "GAME sounds interesting, but it's educational." From a game designer's view, though, they're all much more alike than they are different.

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