Studio Cypher

M.I.L.O.

nathan@studiocypher.com (Nathan Mishler) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:38:00 GMT

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!

More Art Games

nathan@studiocypher.com (Nathan Mishler) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:26:00 GMT

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?”

The first one is Fez. You can think of Fez as Super Paper Mario on steroids. In it, you control a little white guy who wears a Fez. The little guy walks around the world, jumps from platform to platform, climbs ladders… the usual stuff. The unusual stuff is that you can rotate the camera, which flips over and then re-flattens itself as a 2D image once more, making platforms that are “really” far away suddenly close and reachable. This is all done in a retro 8 bit art style.

It makes me want to make an ARG that gives the players access to a world of 8bit representation. It also makes me want to make an ARG that’s all about different points of view, literal or emotional. What if we could give our players a way to look at characters and situations from different angles? Literally?

Game number two is World of Goo. It’s a game where you arrange little blobs of goo into leaning towers. It’s a puzzle game. It’s also amazing how expressive a little ball of goo can be if you stick eyes on it. The gameplay is also really fun puzzle stuff.

It makes me want to design an ARG that does not feature humans as central characters, but instead small guys with expressive faces and a limited vocabulary.

Can Games Be Art?

nathan@studiocypher.com (Nathan Mishler) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:55:00 GMT

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.

This art education, which made the artistic process and all the strangeness that comes with it no less than ordinary in my eyes, also left me with an intense hatred of the question “Can X be art?” The answer… is yes. Art is not so mystical and deep as so many people make it out to be. Art is communication, just like what I’m doing now, but in a form that often makes the communication cloudy and unclear.

An artist cannot show you their soul, or the exact shape of their thoughts about life. They can only look at them themselves and try to create those things imperfectly for you to see and think about yourself. Can games do that? Yup. And I have proof.

Check out Gravitation an eight minute game. Play it a couple times. You’ll see that games can do art.

We're back!

nathan@studiocypher.com (Nathan Mishler) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:41:00 GMT

We’re back!

Where have we been?

We helped put together an interactive part of an art exhibit.

And we made a game that you'll be able to see in two weeks. For those of you who wish we’d finally do some ARG stuff again, you should check back then.

ARGs Everywhere: Walt Disney World

ian@studiocypher.com (Ian Pottmeyer) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:12:00 GMT

Last summer I took a vacation in Walt Disney World, and after riding a few of the rides, it really struck me how similar imagineering is to designing ARGs. The people who design the attractions at the Disney theme parks are called the Disney Imagineers. All of the rides, from Space Mountain to the Tower of Terror, are the result of their work. But what makes designing theme park rides similar to ARGs?

Because the stories being told are so closely interwoven with how they're told.

The Imagineer's goal isn’t just to entertain, but to immerse the audience in the ride’s world using whatever technology they can find or invent. Sometimes the immersion is simple, like the runaway train at the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad or the “crash test dummy’s point of view” of Test Track. Other times, the immersion is more complex, like Muppet 3D’s combination of a 3D movie, animatronics, live actors, and other effects designed to put you in the Muppet Theater. When the Fozzie on screen squirts his joke flower at you, you get wet.

It's very similar to the “This is not a game” philosophy of ARGs, and it surprised me that the philosophy of immersing the audience as much as possible predates ARGs by at least half a century. It makes me wonder what other unexpected places I'll find the design principles of ARGs.

Games Within Games: running an ARG inside an MMO

will@studiocypher.com (Will Emigh) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:25:00 GMT

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.

Let's run the numbers

You want 5-10 people at a minimum for any live event. Our experience is that each level of interactivity appeals to about 10% of the previous level. In a non-ARG context, for example, if your blog has 1000 people reading, only about 100 will ever post a comment. That means that to get our minimum for a live event, we'll need 50-100 people to participate asynchronously (emails, voicemail, what-have-you). To get that many asynchronous participants, we'll have to have 500-1,000 following along. A lot of these people participate indirectly (discussing the game on forums, etc.), but that's difficult to measure. In the end, we'll have to interest 5,000-10,000 to get enough players at our live event. On the Internet as a whole, that's not unreasonable. If you target a population that's predisposed to play ARGs (like ARGNet's) you'll get a lot more than 10% moving from interested to following along, so you can get away with a lot fewer initial eyeballs too.

However, MMO players probably aren't more likely to play ARGs than the general Internet population, so you'll need that whole 5,000-10,000. And since World of Warcraft (WoW) and similar MMOs are separated by server, you can't run an ARG with the entire population of the game. In addition, WoW makes it difficult for Alliance characters and Horde characters to interact, thus halving the effective population of a server. According to WarcraftRealms, the server with the largest discrete population has about 25,000 people. This means that you'll have to reach a third to half (depending on the level requirements of your event) of all the Alliance players on that server to have a good live event! If you're on a less populous server, you'll have to approach even more.

That can't be right!

True enough. This is just a first-order approximation. If you increase or decrease barriers between levels, you'll definitely change that 10% number. For example, since the Cyphers story required people to subscribe, we had way fewer than 10% going from "not participating" to "following along." Once they were invested in the story, though, about 50% took it to the next level and participated actively.

Still, I wouldn't want to run an ARG entirely in WoW. It's just too hard to get people to play in the limited ways available. Which goes some way toward answering Raph's question about why ARGs and MMOs aren't working together already.

Sometimes Cheating is Good

ian@studiocypher.com (Ian Pottmeyer) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:11:00 GMT

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.

Center Cannot Hold

nathan@studiocypher.com (Nathan Mishler) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:46:00 GMT

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.

It is the story of Elyn's life long battle with schizophrenia. Most of the time people think of schizophrenia as depicted by Hollywood or mass media: the gibbering lunatic that's a danger to themselves and others. It's usually sensationalized because it is hard for us to understand mental illness from the outside. How does a "healthy" brain comprehend the workings of a "sick" one?

This book does not sensationalize at all and takes us along on Elyn's personal journey, letting us in to see what life is like for someone with mental illness. The book's message is this: I a human being. These are my struggles. This is my life.

On that merit alone, I suggest you read this book. But then I thought about games. We tend to use games as a fantasy escape vehicle. We go into games so we can be better versions of ourselves, or do things that we'd never get to do in real life. I wonder, could we make a game version of this book, allow people to step into the shoes of someone mentally ill… and not make it seem sensationalistic or exploitative?

That's the real challenge. First person shooters are nothing but giving you a window into a world that is definitely not real, but could we pull off a game where you are having hallucinations? Possibly. But make it not a cheap thrill?

I don't know. I hope someone tries sometime though. It's a game I would like to see.

5 tricks Super Mario Galaxy borrowed from casual gaming

will@studiocypher.com (Will Emigh) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:20:00 GMT

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.

Level selection – Nothing kills a gaming session like getting stuck. It’s impossible to keep your levels interesting without making it difficult for some people. One of the best ways to rescue people from frustration is to give them a choice. Instead of being linear, SMG has multiple galaxies you can visit, with multiple stars in each. If you can’t get one star, you can always try a different one.
Variety – Eventually, people get bored with any basic game mechanic. To keep things fresh, SMG occasionally opens up a one-off galaxy that has a slightly different way of playing. For example, there are a couple of places where you control a rolling ball instead of just Mario. The occasional change-up keeps the rest of the game enjoyable.
Short- and long-term goals – Whenever someone finishes a goal, there’s a good chance that they’ll stop playing. To keep them coming back, SMG gives them long-term goals as well. In addition to the short-term goal of completing a level, players can unlock new areas, abilities, and story by collecting stars and star bits. These long-term goals make the short-term goals more interesting.
High scores – People like challenges, but they like them achievable. Personal high scores are a great way to make that happen, since most people are able to improve even if they never get as good as the best. Beating a high score, personal or universal, is another long-term goal to keep short-term goals interesting. SMG tracks the number of coins collected in each level as well as allowing players to share their total scores with their friends. This allows people to egg each other on.
Visceral rewards – The best games make you feel like you’re doing something cool. In a way, this is just a very short-term goal. SMG is full of little things that are exciting or visually appealing. For example, at one point SMG has you shoot out of a volcano shortly before it explodes. That’s just plain cool and makes you want to keep playing.

Helvetica: still fresh after 50 years

will@studiocypher.com (Will Emigh) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:42:00 GMT

Ian and I recently watched Helvetica, a documentary on the eponymous font (if you have Netflix, you can watch it on demand). There are a lot of great interviews with designers talking about the impact of Helvetica, both when it was introduced and now. Despite the fact that they're talking about something inherently boring (a font), the interviews manage to be indredibly interesting. How? They're all overstated and passionate.

There's the "old guard" type designer who evaluates Helvetica in terms of carving letters into metal, the pair of designers who think that Helvetica is poopular because it says everything, and even the woman who talks about how Helvetica was behind the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

My takeaway from the movie is that anything can be interesting if it's presented well. Most of the designers interviewed say something similar, but it never becomes repetitive. The film itself is also filled with long sequences of just uses of the font in public and music, yet they never become tiresome.