David Sirlin’s Playing to Win series of articles changed the way that I thought about games. Until I read them, I was a scrub.

Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character. He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub.

I was a Starcraft scrub. I logged onto Battle.NET and only played “friendly” games marked NO RUSHING and whatnot. Every now and then, some jerk would ruin the game by rushing even though it said NO RUSHING and someone would disconnect in disgust. After months and months of play, I never got any better. It never occurred to me that it would be useful to make more than one Barracks (doing so doubles the speed that you can pump out Marines). I was totally inefficient with my resources. I more or less thought that rushing was unbeatable and totally annoying and game-ruining.

And then someone linked me to the Terran build order. Suddenly, I could defend against an early game rush. I started looking forwards to them. It turned out that most players who joined a NO RUSHING game in order to rush, didn’t have any skills past the first attack - they were relying on the other guy quitting in anger.

I’ve never had the drive to become anything close to a professional player, but Sirlin’s series (now a book) gave me a new understanding of truly competitive play. It taught me not to dismiss any move as “cheap” no matter the game.

There is a certain arrogance that comes from being a scrub. It’s the idea that you know better than the designers whether or not their game is balanced. It’s the lazy assumption that because you can’t figure out a better way, that there is no better way. It’s blinding yourself to whole rich fields of strategy and tactics. It’s weirdly choosing not to play the entire game and then blaming others for failing to make the same mistake.

It is in appreciation of the truly competitive game player, the one who understands in detail how the mechanics work and uses ALL of them, that I present the following, taken from a Snopes article about a truly strange soccer game.

Barbados needed to win the game by two clear goals in order to progress to the next round. Now the trouble was caused by a daft rule in the competition which stated that in the event of a game going to penalty kicks, the winner of the penalty kicks would be awarded a 2-0 victory.

With 5 minutes to go, Barbados were leading 2-1, and going out of the tournament (because they needed to win by 2 clear goals). Then, when they realized they were probably not going to score against Grenada’s massed defence, they turned round, and deliberately scored on their own goal to level the scores and take the game into penalties. Grenada, themselves not being stupid, realized what was going on, and then attempted to score an own goal themselves. However, the Barbados players started defending their opponents goal to prevent this.

In the last five minutes, spectators were treated to the incredible sight of both team’s defending their opponents goal against attackers desperately trying to score an own goal and goalkeepers trying to throw the ball into their own net. The game went to penalties, which Barbados won and so were awarded a 2-0 victory and progressed to the next round.

I don’t use their products, but I’m a big fan of the 37signals blog. Today’s post talks about exploiting different revenue streams.

Your self-imposed limitations on how to make money are often just that: self-imposed. Seek out other routes to your destination.

It’s one of the big advantages that small, agile companies have. They can experiment and change directions quickly. Plus, multiple revenue streams help you diversify so all your eggs aren’t in one basket.

I know a lot of web comics creators and diversification is their bread and butter. Most of them give the “main” product away for free (they rely on people passing the comics along for free word of mouth) and then sell secondary merchandise as the main source of income. Shirts, prints, books, a little advertising - these are the things that pay for most web comics.

Not many indie developers take advantage of the multiple streams thing. The Behemoth is an obvious exception. Alien Hominid was funded partially through house refinancing (risky) and partly because they made and sold the action figures before they finished development. Profits from the toys paid for the game.

More indie studios should consider at least selling shirts, I think. A lot of them have these huge fan bases who hunger for ways to show their allegiance between game releases. And with a year or more between releases, some interim cash seems like a good idea. The risk is that you end up spending too much time or effort on the secondary work (the creation and distribution of physical stuff is not the same as making downloadable games). On the other hand, the risk of leaving money on the table is that you run out of cash before your next project is finished.

(P.S. here is one where 37signals makes my “ideas are cheap” argument but, you know, articulately.)

Here is one of the most amazing glimpses into the behind the scenes of video game development I’ve ever seen: deconstructulator

This NES emulator shows how Super Mario Bros. sprites and graphics are stored both on the cartridge and in active memory. It’s really cool.

As a bonus, you get to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. and be reminded of how it’s one of the finest examples of a tutorial level despite (maybe because of) having no text, videos or scripted events. Watch how everything you need to learn is carefully broken down into logical bits, each one building on the last section of the level.

So good.

At The Escapist, Wendy Despain looks at game design with new eyes.

Did you know you can win the first level of Star Wars just by standing in one place, turning in constant circles and holding down the “X” button? Aunt Wendy got something right. He was thrilled. And when he heard the cheerful chimes, a signal to those of all ages that you’ve won something, there was jumping around and fists in the air and lots of shouting I didn’t understand.

But then the next level came up, and things started to go downhill. The instant it began he looked confused. It took him a few seconds to put it into words, but then he said it. “I already won this level.”

And suddenly, the decision to make Super Marios Bros. World 1-2 happen in a cave is revealed to be utterly brilliant.

Cracked.com’s story about 7 Real Conspiracy Theories reminded me of a game I’ve wanted to work on for ages. I started thinking about it in college when I was simultaneously obsessed with Robert Anton Wilson and Civ II. In keeping with my philosophy that ideas are cheap and that it’s implementation that matters, here’s the game so far.

The main concept of the game is that there are secret masters of history behind the scenes, controlling and crafting events. The player takes on one of these puppet masters, in conflict with all the others, which are controlled by AI (or other players?). The goal is to (secretly) take over the world.

At first glance, the game appears to be very similar to any game in the Civilization series. However, all nations are entirely AI controlled. The player has no direct ability to manage unit production, send out settlers or any of the other standard Civ activities. Instead, they can direct members of their conspiracy to infiltrate organizations and governments, foment dissent, assassinate or indoctrinate leaders and other shadowy things. The idea is to shape history and humanity in a way that matches the ideology of your conspiracy.

Early portions of the game are Player vs City and then Region and then Nation. The conspiracy grows, takes over other groups as puppet organizations, and slowly winds its tentacles around the immediate area. As agents infiltrated different levels of government, the player gains more and more ability to see and then affect the direction of policy-making by the AI Nation. In time, the player encounters another shadowy organization and the real war begins.

The conflict plays out backstage, with assassinations, infiltrations and counter-infiltrations of puppet organizations, occult ceremonies, and the occasional out and out attack on your enemies. Wars are started and stopped, economies collapsed and restored and surveillance systems are created and cracked. Half the battle is getting accurate information about where and who your enemies are.

Once the existence of other secret masters comes to light, the game becomes an exercise in paranoia. Are the leaders that you’ve installed actually loyal? Is the information that you’re getting from your agents compromised? Have you really infiltrated the enemy, or is it yet another front or has your agent been brainwashed? With each passing turn, the player must sift through public information (which may or may not be lies) and secret reports (possibly also lies), attempt to sort out what’s going on and act accordingly.

All the while, the player is attempting to drag humanity toward enlightenment or bring about total submission or cause Armageddon or just built enough new landing strips for their Extra Terrestrial allies.

Aside from the Civ games where you play an apparently undying ruler over millennia, the closest game I can find for this idea is Republic: the Revolution a game I had high hopes for - hopes dashed by the lukewarm reviews. Steve Jackson’s Illuminati also has some inspiring material, though it doesn’t have a world simulator running underneath the main conflict.

Someone should make this game!

Listen to this episode of More or Less, featuring a charming tribute to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons. It makes my point exactly about the benefits of stealth teaching.

A generation of young male nerds constructed elaborate fantasy worlds and flights of imagination while getting intimately acquainted with probability and basic statistics to a degree that grade 8 teachers can only dream. It really is unfortunate that the popularity of DnD was focused on a particular subset of the child population.

This raises an important question for the designers of future teaching games: Was the limited popularity of DnD because of the subject matter (Orcs and Elves) or because of the degree to which the math was near the surface of the play? Could you recreate the success for other groups of kids by changing the packaging, or would you need to make the math teaching even MORE stealthy?

There’s a kerfuffle on the Internet about the fact that you can kill people in a video game series and how you can pay to have sex with women in the same series and how you can choose to do these things in rapid succession to the same fictional person. The geniuses at IGN decided to put out a video featuring hooker killing.

The result has been an entirely rational discussion consisting of game enthusiasts and feminists coming together to form a nuanced understanding of freedom of speech, the troubling depictions of women in violent situations, and the interplay of player agency and creative narrative and mechanics in forming the content of a game along with the shifting line between stereotypes and satire. It certainly has NOT resulted in shrill protestations of innocence by gamers who often fail to even grasp why there is a big deal and even shriller condemnations by feminists, many of whom have never played the game that they are tearing apart.

The problem with trying to find a nuanced middle ground here is that it’s difficult to defend the game without falling back on either the “it’s just a game” or the “well no one HAS to kill a hooker” defenses. Both are disingenuous.

If we believe that video games are an important cultural force (and I do) then when the criticism comes, we can’t back away and say “hold on, it doesn’t count here”. There should be no take-backs. If we think that games have merit then we should be able to defend them on their merit. Grand Theft Auto 4 has a Metacritic score of 99/100. It’s pretty clear that the gaming press broadly agrees that GTA:IV is a good and important game. So it should be defensible as such.

We can’t hide behind “no one has to kill a hooker” or “it’s the players not the designers doing the murder” either. The fact is that any video game is created by a bunch of people and the collective decisions of the developers, publisher (and sometimes regulatory bodies) determines what rules and verbs are implemented in the game. Designers shape the world and decide what can and can’t be done. In GTA:IV, for all its realism, I can’t climb over a wall that’s waist height. At some point during development, Rockstar had a meeting about my character’s movement abilities and “climbing short walls” was left off the list.

Which is just to say that if they’d wanted to, Rockstar could have prevented hooker killing. They could have left hookers out of the game. They could have made it so that the hookers were invulnerable to damage after you’d paid them. They could have had cut scenes as part of the sex act that involved the hooker walking away to safety while the main character dozed in post-coital bliss in his driver seat. They could have made the game’s sanction for killing paid hookers (perhaps a bunch of crazed heavily armed pimps) so high as to make the decision untenable. There’s no way that Rockstar was unaware of the controversy around this feature in earlier games from the series, so we can’t argue ignorance or emergent gameplay. Hooker killing is in the game and it’s in there on purpose.

Does this make the game misogynist?

GTA:IV is a game about transgression. Liberty City, as photo-realistic as it is, is not a neutral simulation of the world. Just get in a car (you can borrow your cousin’s) and try to avoid committing a crime and you’ll see what I mean. The controls are tuned for high speed chases - it takes real finesse to stay under the speed limit and in your own lane without causing a pileup. Traffic moves at a snails pace and you can’t help but gun the engine and blast past all the suckers, careening around corners sending cars, pedestrians and lamp poles flying. Cars are disposable and easily stolen and a multiple homicide killing spree and police chase can be ended by ducking in to a spray shop to give your car a new coat of paint or simply by laying low for a few minutes out of sight of the police. You can attack, at any time, anyone that you see. It is far easier to be violent than it is to be law abiding in the GTA universe.

The main storyline tells the tale of a Eastern European immigrant’s rise through the ranks of the underworld, with all the violence of Scarface (the movie) and with the body count of a Mario game (which is to say - a lot). It stars a mostly male cast of racial and cultural stereotypes, though some female characters are present. In order to advance the story, you’ve got to commit a whole lot of crimes.

It also, incongruously, features one of the most robust dating simulators I’ve ever seen in a video game. You meet girls over the course of the game, you exchange phone numbers and then you can call them and ask them out. Sometimes, they call you. Once the date is arranged, you can choose to actually meet them, you can calls to cancel or you can just stand them up. Sometimes you have to choose between completing a game mission and keeping your plans. They’ll comment on your car and your clothes as you take them to places you think they’ll like (bowling, darts, cabaret show, drinks) and have awkward small talk with them. You can decide whether or not to go in for a kiss when you drop them off (I haven’t played long enough, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t date rape them, thankfully).

But it is misogynist?

On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV makes it hard to play a misogynist lead character. As far as I know, there aren’t any male prostitutes offering their services, and you definitely can’t play a female lead (though to be fair, even Deus Ex had to cut the female option because of time and space constraints). There is sex in this game and the sex is clearly aimed at a straight male audience.

That said, it’s easier still to be an equal opportunity scum bag. Of all the people I’ve passed (or run over) on the street, I haven’t identified a single prostitute. The game pulls from criminal and mobster pop culture for its tropes, so the vast majority of the people you will be gunning down will be men. You have to go out of your way to hunt down and kill women. It’s part of the game play but it’s not a core part. There are tutorials or how to date someone properly in the game. You have to work out for yourself (or read about it in someone’s angry or purile screed) that you can hire and murder prostitutes.

The difficulties in talking about games like GTA:IV are legion. For one thing it’s so big that every player’s experience will be very different. Comparing notes with a friend, I learned that he’d spent a good chuck of time watching TV in the game! I didn’t even know you could do that. The scope, scale and detailing of the world in which the game happens is astounding.

The biggest reason for any of the controversy around GTA is that it sits on this weird crossroads between a realistic setting and video game ethics. No one is up in arms about the death toll in any of Super Mario Bros, Mega Man or Final Fantasy despite the fact that the number of flattened Goombas in a single session is APPALLING. GTA takes that ethic and transplants it into a world that looks very much like our own. It’s very easy to stop seeing pixels and start seeing real people, which is why Jack Thompson characterized the games as “murder simulators”.

So cultural commentators see a video featuring the death of two virtual women and get up in arms and the defense, which is “yeah but I killed hundreds of other people too” just takes the discussion on a turn for the worse. Grand Theft Auto 4 is probably one of the best games ever made. It’s also one of the most violent both because of the mandatory storyline killings and because of the freedom you are given to prey upon civilians (prostitute or otherwise) whenever the whim strikes you. It’s a fantasy about being able to cause mayhem in the real world and is all the more effective for how real the world seems.

Warren Spector, who is one of the smartest people in game design, sums up my feelings really well in an interview with Gamespot.

I am frustrated that the games in the GTA series, some of the finest combinations of pure game design and commercial appeal, offer a fictional package that makes them difficult to hold up as examples of what our medium is capable of achieving. The fictional context of GTA all but ensures that it will be portrayed in the mainstream press (and, I guess, in the courts!) as little more than a ‘murder simulator’ when it clearly is so much more–if you take the time to look.

Sadly–and this is part of the point I was trying to make in the interview last week–most people won’t take the time to look past the surface, the fiction, the context. They don’t see the fun and the freedom the game provides. They see carjackings and gun battles and hookers. You can talk about game design genius ’til you’re blue in the face. The people who want to regulate games, and the mainstream audience we want to reach, will ignore you. And then they’ll drop the hammer on our medium. Hard.

This is my entrance in James Portnow’s Game Design Challenge. The goal is to create the character types for a fantasy MMO that is group-centric but that does not simply roll out the tired old classes. Based on the preliminary discussion in the forums it seems like most people are going the direction of inventing new fictions for their classes and deriving mechanics from that. I went at it from the opposite direction.

The Goals

1) Create a brand new way to play.

Move away from the classes have defined Fantasy Games since Dungeons and Dragons got started. CAUTION: We need to consider that we don’t want to be TOO different. A totally unfamiliar fantasy world risks confusing and turning players off our game.

2) Game to be group centric.

Make it easy for groups of friends who want to get together to work together irrespective of the avatars that they have created. Tear down the two biggest barriers to being able to just group with your pals.
a) Lack of flexibility in roles: If I have 5 friends but we are all damage dealers, we are doomed to SHOUTing “LF healers” instead of going into battle.
b) Low level characters can’t adventure with high level friends: If I am a level 15 and my friends all quest for a few days and reach level 22 while I’m off doing exams or whatever, they are taking on challenges that I can’t survive. THAT SUCKS.

3) Bonus goal.

Could we please resolve the issue that if I want to try out a different class I need to create a new character, thus resetting all of my relationships with other players?

Proposal - No Character Classes

Do away with character classes. Avatar advancement no longer means strictly better abilities from level 1 to 60.

Instead, we create a skill point system which is marked by diminishing returns for specialization and lots of choices. Players can pick up skills and abilities in all “classes”. Every level the player gets new skill points which they can spend on improving current skills or on choosing new ones. It is cheaper to learn a new skill than to improve a current one. Going up one rank in a skill confers the same relative benefit for more cost. Sometimes one skill will be a prerequisite for another (you can’t learn Mass Heal without Heal rank 4).

For example, the player might get 10 skill points per level. Learning a skill (Healing) takes 1 point, going to second rank takes 2 more, going to third takes 3 and so on. When a skill is at rank 5, the player has invested 15 points in it. With those same points they could have learned 15 rank 1 skills. As a rank 5 healer, they will be 5 times better than a rank 1 healer (who is also a rank 1 swordsman, rank 1 knife fighter, rank 1 wolf trainer etc.).

Meeting our Goals

1) It’s clearly a new way to play. By mixing and matching skills sets, players will be able to create characters that defy conventional fantasy classes and clichés.

2a) A higher level character would be characterized by some specialization mixed with more breadth of skills. A high level sword specialist might grab a few ranks of healing or status magic so that in the event that there are no healing specialists around, they can keep the party alive.

2b) A new player can very quickly get to rank 3 or 4 in a couple of key skills, allowing them to contribute to a higher level group almost immediately after character creation.

3) If a player realizes at level 14 that they wish they were a magic user instead of an assassin type, they don’t need to start a new character and go back to level 1 and then adventure alone until (if) they catch up with their friends. They can just start training magic abilities and switch over to focusing on magic after a few levels.

Balance Concerns

How do we avoid high level players turning in to cyborg-ninja-pirate-penguin-of-ultimate-doom? By restricting the number of skills that a player can use at any given moment.

One option would be a Guildwars-style deck of skills where only a limited number (8) are available at once.

A better option is to link useable skills to carried equipment. If you are not carrying a sword, you can’t use sword skills. If you are not carrying a fire staff, you can’t cast fire spells. You can’t carry both a two handed sword and a staff at once (though maybe a more limited fire wand and a short sword would offer diversity at the cost of less concentrated power). You need certain ranks in key skills to use certain equipment and you need to be using certain equipment to the activate appropriate skills.

Armour and clothing define defense, stealth, and movement abilities. Equipment in your hands (bows, blades, staffs, wands etc.) define offense, healing and status abilities. Rings, amulets and whatnot define modifiers like resistances, bonuses to abilities etc. You can change up equipped items between fights by rummaging around in your carried inventory but during an encounter, you’re stuck with what you’re wearing.

Conclusion

This scheme offers a high level of customization while protecting against degenerate character classes with restrictions that force avatars to pick from a subset of available abilities. The abilities themselves will be familiar to players, but by mixing and matching them we invite highly unique and personal characters. Imagine a stealthy assassin who kills with ice magic or a two-handed swordsman cloaked in flowing robes and magical fields.

We allow players to train in such a way that they can be good at soloing with one equipment scheme and then by changing some of their gear, they can become a better fit for whatever the party needs in the moment. Now instead of “What? We’re all Barbarians, dammit!” we have “Who has a little healing? Can you take on that role for today?” And instead of “It sucks to be a priest, you can’t do anything on your own” we have “I’m mostly into healing and status abilities, but I picked up a few ranks of mace for those days when I want to go off on my own”.

Short version: The second of 20 game design pitches, written in response to a list that my friends threw together in an effort to stymie me. This week, the theme is “growin’ dudes”.

Brave New Clone - Executive Summary

A lot of people worried that the advent of cloning would bring about a terrible social upheaval, as people made more perfect babies. Stronger muscles, faster brains perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth. What would this new master race of designer humans make of their frail creators? They needn’t have worried. Why make perfect people, when you can make perfect employees?

Brave New Clone (BNC) puts the player in charge of the HR department of a large multinational called DollyCorp. At DollyCorp, human resources is a cradle to grave kind of thing and the main function of the HR department is to grow and educate the future workers, while seeing to the spiritual well being of the current crop. Meanwhile, the corporation as a whole must respond to the constant pressure of the marketplace, not to mention attacks by the competition. Part business tycoon game, part The Sims part science lab, BNC is sure to please the more cerebral player in a tense test of their planning and nurturing skills.

Unique Selling Points

• Make your own clones! Use the latest in high tech genetics to customize your workforce.
• Nurture your flock. The needs of business are many and stringent. Prepare your clones for their future careers.
• Plan for the future! The more you can anticipate the needs of your business, the better you can prepare your clones and the less you’ll need to *shudder* hire outsiders.
• Dominate the world of commerce! Whether it’s making widgets or acting in feelies, together your clones form a team that can make you so much money!

Setting

BNC is riped straight from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. With the advent of genetic engineering, society has discovered how to make people who will be content with their lot in life. Society is rigidly divided into five castes — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon (with each caste further split into Plus and Minus members). All members of society are trained to be good consumers in order to keep the economy strong and are expected to be involved socially; spending time alone is discouraged. Companies have found that the most efficient way to manage their workforce is to grow them themselves. The player controls one such cloning farm (or should I say “cloning firm”?).

Though there is only one world government, there is plenty of conflict in the intra-firm arena. In this era of hyper consumerism and hyper-capitalism, the player holds the keys to the future, in their crop of carefully grown children.

Gameplay

BNC is at its heart a software toy. Similar to games such as Sim City and Creatures hidden under the hood of its cutesy exterior is a robust economics and genetic simulator. Wrapped up in a fantasy package, the player is encouraged to fool around with both aspects of the game, delving as deep into one or the other as they see fit.

Cloning

The cloning aspect is fundamentally an artificial life simulator. Given goals set by the scenario or the player, they must carefully grow, birth and then care for groups of clone children. Getting the mixtures for the initial conception is only the beginning and a lot can happen between fertilization and the little clone’s first job. Activities in the cloning gameplay include:

• Mixing genetics, customizing your children’s features and personalities.
• Ensuring adequate mixes of drugs and nutrients in the vats.
• Creating and maintaining the play gardens.
• Balancing education, bumping children up and down into plus and minus categories as needed, teaching about sex games and preparing them for their future roles in society.
• Giving out Soma.

Of course at all times, an eye must be kept on the bottom line. Over or underproducing the right mix of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons can lead to great financial losses for the company. And of course, budges are always limited and lower than you’d like them to be.

Human Resources

Shepherding your flock of clones is fun and all, but in the end, one must bow to the needs and pressures of glorious industry. Without a successful and profitable enterprise there can be no budget for the cloning gardens.

Managing the business is a whole other task, requiring cunning, guile and a great deal of foresight. It takes time for little clone workers to grow to an age where they can begin working at the firm and the face of industry shifts over time. The prudent manager plans ahead, ordering the right numbers of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, looking ahead by 12 years. In the event of a miscalculation, clones can be hired from other companies (at considerable cost) or if all goes well, perhaps some surplus human resources can be sold off to others.

Truly, the future is bright in this Brave New World.

Some Notes

First off, I’m not entirely happy with this game design. I think that the core idea is good: a software simulator set in the world of Brave New World where the player must actually manage the system that John the Savage hates so much in the novel. Making it about one of the most troubling parts of the society, the breeding of people to intentionally be (varying levels of) dumb and compliant really drives sections of the book home. Turning people into Sims-like toys on an industrial scale is so awesomely fascinating and revolting that it can’t help but be emotionally powerful.

The first problem comes from that strength. For this to work, for players to come face to face with the insanity, you need to get them to agree to come along with you in the first place. So you have to sneak up on them. I think that the best way to do this would be to start them off with a relatively small group of clones that they care for, over time, giving them more and more of the tools and broadening the scope until they are managing armies of clones on an industrial level. But here the second risk. Once you get people to buy into the premise and play the game, how do you turn it around and confront them with what they’ve agreed to do? Players are likely to cry foul. It would be like playing Pac Man and suddenly on level 15 Pac Man gets diabetes. Punishing players for doing what you told them to do is generally a terrible idea.

I’m also not happy with how the business sim part merges in to the cloning part. In my head, the idea of a game where you are rewarded for exercising extreme foresight is a cool mechanic and one that’s not often used in games (most games live on the reflexes to tactics edge of the scale instead of the strategy to long term planning edge). Slow growing people and attempting to anticipate industrial needs that will come 12-18 years in the future is a tough and challenging problem. Actually, it’s probably an impossible problem, which is part of why we DON’T have breeding programs and definitely why we shouldn’t be teaching grade six kids to use specific productivity software instead of teaching them to think.

I like the idea of creating a simulation game that allows players to explore for themselves the themes and consequences of the world created by Huxley and similar works of art. Imagine a 1984 game. But the other half of the problem is that these are dystopias. They aren’t meant to work!

How would you make a game out of Brave New World/?

A little while ago, I sent out this challenge to my friends: “Inspired by Kate Beaton. I’m not so much with the comics. But I will write for you a short game design pitch for the first 20 concepts that you throw at me.”

Every now and then, I’m putting together a pitch based on the concepts. Will there be executive summaries and lists of unique selling points? Oh yes, there will! Then after the excitement has died down, I write up some notes about what I was thinking.

PANTS! Executive Summary

PANTS! is a fast paced web-based casual game in the spirit of Burger Time or Diner Dash. Set in a garment factory, the player takes control of a team of pants makers, in a desperate dash to make the most, best, pants in the shortest amount of time. With a unique team-play coop mode and well as nail biting head-to-head pants making, PANTS! is sure to bring players back to the table for just one more stitch, again and again.

Unique Selling Points

• Fast paced pants making action!
• Unique team-based actions invites players to bring their friends!
• Mouse-based pants interaction asks players to balance speed with accuracy
• Fashion theme appeals to wide range of demographics and casual players

Setting

PANTS! is set in a garment factory (but the nice kind). Run by uFash a boutique company that specializes in “custom one of a kind fashions at factory prices”, the factory requires an ever changing inventory of pants, always up to date with the fashions of the minute. As a result, the designs are in constant flux with the only constant being the NEED FOR MORE PANTS. The player plays the shift leader of a team of pants makers. The team consists of a Cutter, a Stitcher, a Detailer and a Folder. Together, these workers must make pants that pass quality inspection, while also keeping the pants making to a brisk pace in order to earn the highest wages possible (teams are paid per pair of pants).

Gameplay

The core game loop of PANTS! is the act of making a pair of pants. The 4 NPC workers sit at a long table, left to right. Fabric arrives on the left side of the screen. The Cutter cuts it into the assigned pattern and passes it to the Stitcher who sews the pieces together before passing it to the Detailer who ads labels, fashionable rips, etc. before passing it to the Folder who folds and packages the garment. Left to their own devices, these workers will work at a certain speed, happily making pants but not necessarily as efficiently as they could. Maybe the stitcher is much slower at sewing than the cutter is at cutting, resulting in a pile of unsewn pieces of cloth. Maybe it’s the Detailer that’s taking too long to add rivets. And definitely, everyone could be working faster (the bums)! This is where the player comes in.

Coaching

At any time, the player can step in and take over for an especially slow workmate to show them how it’s done. This opens up one of 4 mini-games (one for each task). The player plays the mini game for a set period of time (10-30 seconds) and then depending on how well they do, their lazy subordinate will receive a boost in efficiency, which over time will drain away until they return to lazy equilibrium.

By jumping between mini-games, the players can keep cajoling each of the workers towards their peak efficiency. The more you coach an individual worker, the slower their efficiency creeps back down. Playing the mini-games well and choosing which mini-game to focus on will be the key to keeping the production lines humming.

The Mini-Games

Cutting

The player’s mouse becomes a pair of scissors and, as quickly as possible, they must trace the outline of the garment pieces, according to the displayed design. Points are awarded for both speed and accuracy, with bonuses for the number of cuts required to make the pieces. Later levels require increasingly complex patterns.

Sewing

Using the mouse button to start and stop the machine, the player uses the mouse to turn and rotates the pieces of cloth to stitch them together in the right way. Points are awarded for both speed and accuracy, with bonuses for never stopping the sewing machine. Later levels require increasingly complex patterns.

Detailing

Given a desired final pattern and several boxes of tags, rives, sequins and whatnot the player must quickly recreate the look by affixing the right things in the right places. Points are awarded for both speed and accuracy, with bonuses for never having to remove a placed piece. Later levels require increasingly complex patterns.

Folding

Folding plays out as a kind of rhythm action game, where the player clicks on the right parts of the pants in the right order to fold them properly, then place them in the box and seal it properly. Points are awarded for both speed and accuracy, with bonuses for never having to remove a placed piece. Later levels require increasingly complex packaging for an ever more sophisticated clientele.

Managing the Line

Even if each of the workers is running at 100% efficiency, there is plenty more for the player to do. New design patterns are constantly streaming in, different ones with different degrees of difficulty for each task. By swapping them forwards and backwards on the queue, the player can smooth out the bottlenecks. Too many easy-cut hard-sews in a row will result in a big pileup of pieces of fabric, but this can be easily handled by pushing a few hard-to-cut patterns to the front of the queue.

In addition the workers also suffer from fatigue. By swapping them with fresh workers you can keep the assembly line running at peak efficiency. Careful though, new workers while they are more fresh are also less trained. So they’ll need more coaching at first, and bringing on new hires ain’t cheap! So choose carefully (but quickly!).

Multi-player

Perhaps the killer app of PANTS! co-op multi-player allows more than one person to team up on the same shift. Teams of 1-5 (called ’shifts’) compete head to head against other shifts for prestige and prizes on the PANTS! website. With 1-3 players on a team, jobs will shift and change depending on the moment to moment needs of the assembly line. With a full complement of 5, everyone can buckle down and focus on specializing on his or her favourite mini-game with the 5th player managing the queue.

The PANTS! website encourages community by allowing players to form sub-divisions of uFash made of up groups of players who team up against the others. sub-divisions can customize their group’s logo and other information about their web page, participate in tournaments and other larger events and of course, compete for the annual prize of top uFash pants makers.

PANTS! players can unlock achievements and awards form reaching milestones in the game such as 100% efficiency on an assembly line or logging 10 hours of sewing or any other aspects of the game, encouraging bragging rights and repeat visits.

Some Notes

Ever since Lucy tried to handle life in the Candy Factory assembly lines have been inherently hilarious to the people who don’t have to work on them. After match-3 games like Bejeweled or spacial games like Tetris time management games are one of the most popular casual games genres. So for PANTS! this was a pretty natural choice.

Compared to the core gaming market, the casual gaming market is dominated by women who tend to be in their 30’s and 40’s, a far cry from the traditional core gaming marker of males 18-35. As a result, game makers for the casual scene look for topics that stray from the traditional violence, explosions and car crashes that make up a lot of the core market. Again, PANTS! shines in this area.

The most unique thing about the PANTS! pitch is the multi-player co-op mode. Most casual games don’t have anything like this (they are straight up single player games) but I think that there is definitely room for a community for people who wanted some light player interaction. Puzzle Pirates which is a massively multi-player casual online game is quite successful and working along the same lines though PANTS! has more in common with games like Halo 3, Battlefield 2142 or Team Fortress 2 in that the games are quick one-off competitions with match-making and leaderboards.

The idea for multi-player, which I think may be the best part, came by accident out of my desire to have an assembly line game where you played more than one part of the line. When I started writing the pitch it didn’t exist yet and it wasn’t until I’d worked out the consequences of letting players jump in and out of roles (couldn’t more than one person do this?) that I decided to include it.

I really like the coaching mechanic. Time management games are all about deciding where to throw your attention at any given moment, and by offering the player a perpetual choice between playing one mini-game or another or just managing the assembly line at a macro level, there is a lot of potential depth in the game.