The article is Butchering Pathologic, by Quintin Smith, over on the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun. It starts with:

I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played.

Intrigued yet? Go read the article. It’s in three parts, so it may take a while.

So why am I getting so excited about a Russian game from 2004? Because somewhere, in an obscure little notebook, I keep a list of Things I Want To Do In Videogames. And Pathologic happens to contain an astounding number of those things.

Things such as ‘unfun’: tragedy, horror, despair, negative consequences, ruin. We’re not using the full spectrum of emotions in games, and there’s no good reason for it.

Or playing with the medium. I looooove playing with the medium. A lot of my designs use it.

Or a living world that changes significantly during the game and reacts to the player’s actions. John Walker, in his review of Pathologic over at Eurogamer, correctly points out how shallow most so-called “living cities” in games are. Pedestrians walk around, but nothing ever changes. Pathologic apparently goes a lot further. And why not? I think people don’t do this for wrong reasons.

Or what I call ‘plastic reality’. In Pathologic, even the buildings become sick.

Or plain old weirdness, of course. I am a David Lynch fan after all. Things don’t have to make sense. Or at least, not in an ordinary way.

And finally, Ice-Pick Lodge, the developers of Pathologic, seem to take storytelling very seriously. And that is also something to be applauded.

Ironically, all of this happens in a game that is apparently very hard to play – in other words, the kind of game I would normally delete within 5 minutes, and then spend 30 minutes ranting about. Will I ever play it? Who knows. I’ve seen it online for 10-15 Euros, well within impulse-buy range.

I think what is most inspiring about reading about Pathologic is the fact that a group of people managed to cram this many non-mainstream elements into one game. That someone managed to make a game, to quote Quintin Smith:

[...] as daring and unique as one of those 15 minute indie games that everyone raves about (and rightly so!), only blown up into a 40 hour epic.

That warms the cockles of my heart. And it makes me wonder, once again, if I am not making games like this because of the constraints of “The System”, or because I don’t have the courage to do it. I console myself by the thought that I don’t know enough crazy people to make something like this with. Well, crazy and available people.

Contemplating why wildly ambitious games like these often seem to come from non-core games industry countries is worth a blog post of it’s own.

I realize, of course, that the game I am imagining based on the articles I have read is likely quite different from the real thing. But the excitement is real.

Update: Corrected the developer’s name.

Here are some observations on Lego Star Wars now that I’m playing through again in coop mode:

The inherent absurdity of a film license done in Lego allows TT to circumvent the restrictions of the license (especially this license: They can do things with Star Wars I can imagine few official Star Wars products being allowed to do). While you could do a funny game without Lego and you could probably even do a non-humorous Lego game, the humor and the Lego nicely reinforce each other.

Lego also means you can get away with simpler graphics and lower production values, which means lower costs as well as more platforms and thus more potential customers.

Lego Star Wars is made for replayability. It is easy to finish all of the levels, but advancing in the pretty deep metagame takes more time and skill. It also requires the player to completely break the rules of the Star Wars universe and replay levels with groups consisting of, say, Darth Vader, Han Solo, R2-D2, Jar-Jar Binks and young Anakin Skywalker, in order to reach each level’s nooks and crannies. So this replayability is possible because of the light tone and irreverence regarding the license. Lego Star Wars’ replayability would not fit in a Half-Life 2 or a Gears of War (although in the latter the replayability is in the multiplayer mode).

On a side note: This kind of replayability is an excellent way of generating more hours of fun per development dollar. A Lego Star Wars level might cost more than a similar level that is designed to be played only once, but it provides disproportionally more entertainment.

Lego Star Wars has strong casual game values: it’s very easy to get into, restarts after failure are very quick, and the rewards are constant.

However, the game also proves again and again that being extremely forgiving and extremely charming can make up for a lot of mistakes, bugs and sources of frustration. And there really are a lot: fiddly vehicle sections, a camera implementation that means one player can push the other one off a cliff despite being on the other side of the screen, and very uneven level design. I actually find the game more frustrating during the second coop playthrough than during my first solo playthrough.

Despite that slowly increasing frustration, we’re still having fun, and I can see us playing the game for a bit longer. At least, until my Wii works again and we can dive into Lego Batman.

The 90-9-1 Principle is an often discussed concept that has been used in countless conversations about online communities and social strategy. Until now, there hasn’t been a single collection of description and support for the principle, making it hard to share a single links with clients, colleagues, and friends who haven’t heard of 90-9-1. This site works to solve that problem!

Funnily enough, I have occasionally wanted to refer to the 90-9-1 principle, but without just hand-wavingly putting in a sourceless reference, so I had to scour the web for a good bit of text explaining things. So this site looks like it may solve an actual problem for me. This site even lists some sources, making it at least appear to be a valid and reputable theory.

Update: The web page I used until discovering this dedicated site is this one by Bradley Horowitz from February 2006. It is the earliest mention of the idea I was able to find.

trees full of apples. unassuming, you stride under one, and an apple falls from the tree and crushes you, sending you back to the start of the screen. you approach again, this time cautiously poking your nose out under the tree in an attempt to goad the apple into falling before you pass. you don’t jump back in time, you get crushed. this time it works, and you begin carefully making your way across a screen full of apple trees. some apples only fall in pairs, and you have to dodge between the two. sometimes you can jump at an apple to spook it into falling early. about halfway across, you notice an apple low enough you can jump over it. tired of the tedious apple-teasing, you graciously accept the respite of an apple you won’t have to dodge mid-fall. you jump over the apple, and the apple falls up and kills you. the apple falls up and kills you.

Very interesting. I am noticing a stronger tendency to play with the medium’s conventions, but I don’t know if that is because I am paying more attention to indie games these days or because there are more indie games or people actually are playing more the medium’s conventions… or all three. Yes, I know people have been doing this for a while – I am talking about a perceived increase. In any case, I think it’s a good thing.

A simple and naive way to provide… variety, for want of a better word, is to simply keep cranking up the difficulty. It’s a time-honored technique: people have been doing this for decades. It has also caused many players to stop playing a given game with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Player behavior being what it is, not that many people get far enough into games to notice that the ending sucks. There is no evolutionary pressure to improve games beyond a certain point, just as in human biology there is no evolutionary pressure to avoid degradation and breakdown beyond a certain age (guess who turned 37 not long ago).

This is of course not the case with games designed for high replayability, such as games with a strong multi-player component. And you can list AAA games with great endings – say, Half-Life 2. But in games with a consistently high quality, I claim that few people will single out the ending as the factor that makes them buy the next game. How many games have really been designed for a great ending? It is a major blind spot.

(I am fully aware that all those games I ranted about earlier might all have had great endings. That is what made me rant.)

The problem with Fairway Solitaire is that it remains, at its core, a luck-based game. You cannot use any strategies, only short-term heuristics based on the current face-up cards and the next one in your deck (which you can see). The only longer-term decision that you can make is when to use your ‘joker’ clubs. Money-making is not tuned well, as I said before, and so there are no interesting decisions to be made there. There is a special event that takes away one of the items you bought (a pretty bad idea in my opinion), but I was always able to buy it back without even looking at how much money I had.

As you progress through the courses, the difficulty is slowly ratcheted up. The goals for each course become slightly more difficult, the courses become slightly more complex, the shuffling becomes slightly less advantageous (or so I infer from the fact that it is easier to make long runs in the early courses). Inevitably, at some point the luck factor starts to play a big role, and I had to redo courses several times, or even go back to early courses to farm joker clubs. I think that was about the point where the game stopped being fun, but I kept playing out of stubbornness.

The second to last course, Mystery Madness, uses a very non-intuitive card layout, where you cannot tell which card will be revealed when you remove a face-up card. Or, rather, you cannot tell which card you have to remove to reveal more cards. So you can easily find yourself riffling through half a deck, trying to get rid of one face-up card while twenty or more cards stay stubbornly unrevealed. I gave that a couple of tries with a full set of joker clubs, and finally gave up in disgust.

In my opinion, Fairway Solitaire would have been a much better game with about 10 fewer courses. It could have been positively awesome if it had allowed for interesting longer-term decisions. Still, I played it over 36 hours. I can’t complain about the value for money compared to full-price games.

But I don’t know if I would buy a sequel.

Cases in point:

• Skate and Burnout Paradise, where I respectively got stuck in the tutorial and failed to find the game.
• Mass Effect, where I instantly got lost in the first mission. I mean, be serious: Spawn the player in the first level and then point him in the wrong direction? Do you know how much trouble I went through to rotate the camera just so at the start of some of the Manhunt 2 levels I worked on? Maybe this was a glitch – I can’t believe this was left in the game.
• Assassin’s Creed, which generally befuddled me.
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Don’t get me started on the first boss battle.
• Halo 2. I literally got killed by the first enemy in the game. This is a mass-market shooter? I played it again a while later, but the streaming issues, blah graphics, AI problems and a ridiculous cut-scene meant I stopped before very long. (I was expecting a somewhat serious SF story, not some crappy schlock where someone drop-kicks bombs through space.)

Why should gamers put up with it when developers don’t take the time to polish the first 30 minutes or so of their games?

Anyway, I just discovered that Manveer Heir over at Design Rampage ran into a similar problem. He couldn’t even start Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, and he rightly condemns the fabled design geniuses over at Konami for it. Right on!

This is a very exciting time to be a videogame designer.
Videogame design is evolving from a barely understood activity done by genius designers driven by their gut feelings to a craft with shared techniques and methodologies. A common vocabulary cobbled from various fields (interface design, psychology, complex systems, physics, etc.) is slowly emerging. Successes and failures are analyzed…
But it’s still a big mess, a large toolbox where any designer can find the right tool to confirm exactly what he believes in. There are no universally accepted truths, only opinions about what makes a great game, whether or not videogames are an art form or whether there is an effective method to teach videogame design.
We lack ways to compare games in an objective manner, ways to describe them in a shared language. Without proper description, there can be no true understanding. Success in videogames still hinges on applying traditional techniques, copying, marketing, luck or genius. And even if success is achieved, there’s no guarantee that we can know why it happened.

Arts and sciences have rules and laws, not just techniques. But what are the rules of videogame design?
Where is our redox law? Our perspective rule? Our theory of relativity?
Where are the formal tools we can use to better understand, analyze, and improve games?
How big is the game design space and can we identify its virgin territories?
What are the rules we can bend or break to create totally new experiences?

This article presents a theory of what videogame game design is and explains how to find such rules.

It’s very bold. It deserves to be read.

I then immediately failed the next mission: interrogation. I vaguely knew I had do something with some dude talking near a tree somewhere (NEAR A TREE – thanks Ubisoft). I could hear a dude talking quite clearly, but when I came near him and I was told to press LT to start the interrogation mission, the game targeted a guard standing right next to the talking guy. I tried multiple times. Little triangle over his head, funky cyberspace sparkles over his body: This was clearly my target. So I followed him and since I couldn’t find an ‘Interrogate’ button, I punched him. This annoyed him and his two dozen pals, so I ran off. I tried again in a quiet alley and hey presto! I killed him. Wait. Um. Press LT again. Another guard targeted. I figured this was not what the game wanted me to do.

So, you need to get close to a dude. Then when the game says: ‘Press LT to start the interrogation mission’, press LT. The game may tell you you are too far away. Or too close (too close to interrogate someone?). But once you’ve started the mission you can target the right dude instead of random guards. It’s a bit like GTA’s side missions, only awkward.

So it turns out that Assassin’s Creed is a brittle, tangled mess of interface modes. It also has a metric ton of different gameplay elements. Saveable Citizens. Scholars. Vigilantes. Viewpoints. I am not quite sure how to recognize all of these things. I do know that the legend of the map has something like 3 columns of symbols. Seriously. I can barely tell where what is due to the cool styling, but it sure has a lot of different symbols.

I am also having some trouble understanding the setting. I work for some organization in some country. It appears they have a creed. They also have a big honking castle, and get attacked early on, but they protect the citizens of the town outside the castle and repel the invaders. So I am guessing they are good guys and they sure aren’t secretive. So which organization do the guards in town belong to, and why do they try to kill me when I look at them funny? Either they are on my side in which I am totally not finding it funny that they’re messing with me, or they are not on my side, in which case: Dude! I am with the people that protect this town! Where were you when the Templars attacked? Cut me some slack! I am picking this guy’s pockets for a good cause! (Don’t ask me what it is, I have no clue why picking one guy’s pockets leads me to interrogating some random other guy.)

And why do some guards find me suspicious on sight (unless I walk slow) while others assume I am just a regular guy? I have absolutely no clue. And Ubisoft’s choice of frame story, while being cute in general, makes it hard for them to just have a narrator tell me what’s up.

Overall I have to say that so far in Assassin’s Creed I am having trouble figuring out exactly what situation I am in and which tools I can use to achieve my goals.

People who know me know I am a big fan of quantified and/or empirical approaches to game design. I really truly think that if you’re not using these kind of methods, over time you will go out of business, as more and more of your competitors start using it (and publishers start demanding it), and the advantage they have starts canceling out any spark of genius you may have. It’s a statistical fact! :)

Well, it looks like someone called Kevin Nickel got their hands on a copy, because you can now download the book as a
400K text file. This is the most detailed book ever written about the design of a single game.

Oh, and Chris has started a blog on politics.