Category: Games

Anything having to do with games (Computer & Tabletop)

Brb, Civ5.

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I got Civ5 so I won’t be writing a lot for a while.

Started with Civ5 this Sunday. The AI sucks at the moment and there’s a lot of stuff broken. Nevertheless, the new game mechanics, especially the new combat is brilliant and it has some very nice ideas built-in. There’s a lot of reviews so I won’t rehash what you’ve probably read a lot of times already, but you should really be looking at the critical reviews and not the positive ones if you want to get into the substance of things rather than partake in the huge hype surrounding the game.

In fact, I wish people gave up more weight to critical reviews rather than the one gushing about new and popular games, which is in fact all that the pop-review sites seem to be able to do. The critical reviews tend to be more thoughtful, and even when they’re not positive about the game in the end, you end up understanding more about the game from them, rather than from the hype-bandwagon. This is the second reason why Zero Punctuation is one of my favourite locations to get my reviews (the first one naturally being that Yahtzee is so creatively funny).

Anyway, back to the subject, if you’re interested in the game or the series but not burning to play it right goddamn now, then I would advise that you wait at least until Christmas sales. Then you’ll both get the game with a few patches in so that the most horrible bugs and imbalances are fixed and you’ll likely to find it on a nice steam sale and grab it for 20€ less or something. If you’re a huge fan, then you’ve already got it so there’s no point in me telling you not to 😉

I personally would have also waited for a bit, perhaps playing it pirated once or twice to see how it goes, but after I saw an Amazon.co.uk deal for 20€ less than Steam, I couldn’t help myself 🙂

So I decided to play TES:Oblivion

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Oblivion modding is awesome. But then I go on a tangent…

I bought Oblivion: Game of the year edition from steam, as part of a very cheap bundle which had Fallout 3 which I wanted to replay. Good offer. So lately, so that I stop myself from pre-ordering Civilization 5 (Note: I failed) I decided to give oblivion a ride.

I knew from experience that mods for Bethesda games make them around 100% better, fixing and improving all the gameplay elements that the developers didn’t get right. I also had a lot of practice with modding Fallout 3 so I wasn’t going to play Oblivion without first getting some of the better mods included, as in fact, no-one should ever do ((Seriously, Bethesda could make a nice amount if they repackaged some of those games with a collection of the best mods build-in and thus with improved stability, and then sold the game again as a special edition or something))

I thus decided to first find out some nice mods for the game and then start playing to get the best experience. Without going too much into it, what followed could pretty accurately be surmised in the following pic

Modding is more addicting that playing
Modding Oblivion: It's pretty much like this.

Since I decided to start Oblivion on last Sunday’s lazy afternoon, I’ve spent around 12 hours gathering, reading on, installing and debugging mods and 6 hours of actually playing the game. It’s not that it’s particularly hard to do it (the tools that the community had created to make modding easier are just insane) but I would be gaming for half an hour and then find something that annoyed me (eg: why are there only 8 hotkeys?) and then I would stop and spend half an hour finding  a mod to scratch my itch. Reading the mods description, they would mention other cool mods to go with it, and I would check those out as well, perhaps choosing one or two to install alongside it. Spend about 0.5 – 1 hour getting the mods installed (doing it properly and depending on the size) and then get back into the game to check the results.Then perhaps half an hour more in case some unexpected bug started cropping up.

Then, then next day, after having played a bit, I would make a reddit thread on it to ask for some opinions, and about 8 more mods would be suggested, 4 of which just sound impossible to resist, and once I returned from work, spend more hours installing them than playing again.

I just can’t resist. The stuff that the community has come up with, for free mind you, are just incredible. I’m talking about gigabytes over gigabytes of cool new stuff. From completely new texturing to brand new quest chains to completely reworked combat and race systems which make the game truly overcome its limitations. Not to mention the modding utilities which are more impressive than many commercial applications.

This kind of thing really drives home the point of how doing things without the profit motive provides a far better motivation and thus better quality.  Consider that all these incredible work is being provided for free and because the modders weren’t feeling any monetary pressure, they created something that improves the vanilla game manifold. Was it difficult for the original developers to implement such things such as physics based archery or realistic combat with special moves? Not really but the need to put the game out there and then move on to the next project necessitated that many things needed to just be left as they were. The end result was a magic system that was considered underwhelming and an archery system that was underpowered,  not to mention the whole lotta bugs that were left open and required 3 community patches to fix.

Lucky for me, the PC gaming ecosystem allows modding which just makes things so much better when you’re getting into a game a year or two down the line (not to mention 4 years as in the case of Oblivion). Not only have the most egregious bugs been squashed by the community but there’s so much extra content  to choose from, that your first experience with the game is going to be miles better than if your played the game when it came out (not to mention better graphics quality since your PC should be able to handle it better).

It also goes to show that a game’s life cycle cannot be only until a few months after its release, as most companies treat their AAA titles, solely based on the monetary concerns. A well maintained and updated game can continue to provide wealth on the long tail long after it’s glory days are over. In fact, an actively maintained game can continue increasing its value based on how much the updates increase the word-of-mouth advertising and community. The immense success of the TF2 model is ample proof of that. And there, the updates are so awesome because, again, they’re not made with the profit motive in mind.

Now compare that to the DLC mediocricy and unmoddable nature of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and you can easily see which game is going to outlive the other.  But of course, for the bottom line in the short-term it’s better to have the old game die and sell the sequel rather than continue improving the old model to perfection. Unfortunately, this only leads to mediocricy which is sold mostly on hype and marketing, rather than quality.

Fortunately for those like me who like polish, moddable games like Oblivion and Civilization or supported ones like TF2, provide it and at a far more sensible price tag in the long term.

PS: This is my bookmark group for the mods I’m using, including some handy guides. Just in case you’re interested.

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Holy Shit! This is Mortal Kombat!

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The upcoming Moral Kombat game finally feels like a worthy successor to my loved franchise.

Mortal Kombat
Image via Wikipedia

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been a huge Mortal Kombat fan, ever since I first saw the original MK in the very conservative Greek society, after sneaking in an arcade (In Greece, it’s illegal to go into arcades when you’re under 17. Blame the Church. Seriously). I was hooked.

Later on, I managed to get the PC version of it and I played it as much as humanly possible with my teenage friends. Then MK2 came out which was even better and this is where the franchise ended for me. Oh sure, I played the Trilogy and some of the sequels but I found them to be either trying to make a quick buck or severely watered/dumbed down for a movie, or simply jumping on a bandwagon with 3d fighting. I had given up on it ever achieving it’s MK2 glory in my eyes.

I recently got a nice hope for a reboot of the franchise from the short fan film, but I have now also checked the E3 preview of the latest installment of it and I’m stoked with excitement. This looks like it is finally a worthy continuation of MK2.

The only thing that I’m not sure I like are the X-ray attacks, which while nice looking are seriously assaulting my suspension of disbelief. I mean, I can accept the very brutal moves that happen in the game, but how can someone seriously continue fighting with a broken back or neck or crushed internal organs? It’s like someone cutting someone in two and they continue as if nothing happened. My band-aid rationalization of it is that everyone’s overloaded with Morphine before the match and can’t really feel shit until they die.

Aaaanyway, not so important as it’s not much worse than 2 people smacking each other with gigantic swords and losing only a tiny bit of health every time (as is what happens in most other fighting games). Other than that, the game looks brilliant and it seems to be a blast for couch play (including co-op, w00t). I loved the small things about it as well, how for example the tag team player ended up being thrown into the acid mid play (what happens in the next round?) or how their clothes started ripping and they got wounded as the battle went on. And of course the awesome fatalities which truly make up for the horror that was Babalities and Friendships. Ugh!

Can’t wait.

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What are some realistic moral choices in video games?

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A few examples to drive the point through of how morality can be make to be a more interesting proposition in games.

Following my article on morality in video games yesterday and the resulting thoughtful discussion in reddit, I noticed that some people have trouble grasping what is wrong with the way morals work in video games or how they could possibly be improved within the framework of a video game’s limitations. One claimed that we can never have better morality without inventing a full-fledged AI first while another pointed out that a simple morality based on the reaction of others to your own actions would be the most realistic.

It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to illustrate what I’m talking about when I claim that video games are the best artistic way to explore ethics, is to present some examples as they would appear in a game and in a way that is compatible with current technology and some of the ideas I presented in my previous article. Hopefully this will clarify a bit my vision of a how a better moral system might work.

Since I started with Fallout 3, I’m going to continue using it as an example setting. In case you’re not familiar with this particular post-apocalyptic world, you may not understand some of the concepts I’m talking about such as “Supermutants” or “Ghouls”. In that case, perhaps you can find this link of some use.

Example 1: Lets imagine that our character has entered a bar in one of the smaller and more isolated cities to find a contact of his. While inside, he notices that the Ghoul waiter is being harassed by the patrons of the place as well as the owner. It seems that this place has a very strong anti-ghoul (or perhaps pro-human) sentiment. If the character intervenes at this point and comes to the defence of the waiter, the situation quickly escalates to hostilities as the xenophobic crowd labels you as a ghoul-lover and treats you accordingly. Your contact avoids you due to the amount of attention you brought to yourself (and you may even lose your quest). The prices in that town rise. People treat you with contempt etc. If your dialogue options are too aggressive you may end in a fight and by killing one or two people there, you make the guards come and attempt take you into custody and so on.

Lets say now that instead of intervening in defence of the ghoul, you join in the abuse and finally put the last drop. The Ghoul runs away and subsequently leaves the city. You forget about this event until one day you visit another village (perhaps a ghoul one) and find out that the one ghoul is now mayor or some other important personality for your current quest. Subsequently you get into a situation.

Or lets say that you opt not to do anything and let the situation unfold as it will. Unfortunately soon enough the ghoul is pushed over the edge by an unruly patron and things escalate dramatically. The ghoul pulls out a live grenade and tries to take himself and everyone else out. You survive, but perhaps some important personalities in that city don’t, such as the contact you were trying to see. Your inactivity lost you the quest.

Now the way this event is scripted is so that there are no perfect solution and no way to avoid taking the consequences of your (in)action. This is an attempt to simulate how the real life works, where there’s no clear “good” path, sometimes inactivity is as bad as doing evil, and very often, doing the good deed is far more costly than not. The interesting part comes from the fact that sometimes you may not like any of the available options but you still need to make one which lies in some kind of grey area. This makes people not only agonize on which choice is better but significantly adds to the replay value as next time you’ll make another choice to see where it leads you.

Now lets add some of the ideas I brought last time. In the case of factions the effects will be predictable. Doing nothing will probably leave you neutral in the eyes of the current settlement and perhaps lower you status in the eyes of Ghouls. Opposing the crowd will significantly drop your reputation in the current settlement and improve your ghoul standing, while abusing the ghoul will drop your reputation for ghouls and perhaps the new settlement you’ll find it later while increasing your reputation for the current settlement.

Now lets also consider that we have implemented alternative moral scales to the good/evil and one of them is about xenophobia/xenophilia. Lets say that during the course of the game you’ve spent significant time defending other ghouls and supermutants from abuse, you’ve helped in their quests and so on. As a result, you are very xenophilic towards impure humans. Now the game changes the script and due to your reputation, the ghoul comes to you explicitly for assistance. Do you turn it down and lose “karma” in that scale or do you follow your principles and help it despite the steep consequences? This might become even more agonizing since losing karma in that scale might disable (or make more difficult to acquire) a particular perk which relies on you having enough of a rank in it. On the other hand, if you have spent most of the game treating impure humans like shit and are xenophobic instead, when you initiate any discussion with the ghoul you can’t avoid but escalating the situation to the grenade situation (i.e. all other dialogue options are disabled). Now your intolerant nature (which you’ve built-up in the rest of the game) has cost you a quest or perhaps some serious amount of money in the future.

Much of this example is not really that much different in what has been implemented many times already but there’s one significant difference. You see, most of the time, when game designers create such a scenario, they can’t avoid giving you some blatantly obvious “good” choices and some blatantly obvious “bad” choices and then limit you to choose among them. They would for example create a dialogue path that completely defused the situation and let everyone happy, or a scenario where you kill someone, or one where you ask for money in some way. But the tough part about morality is that there’s more often than not, no “good” choices to choose from and the player is forced to make some tough decisions that he’ll have to live with.

Even the scenario above for example, limits the consequences of my actions generally to my own character, but occasionally, it is far more gripping to see events that don’t affect your character in a material way, but rather deal simply with morality. This is where the multiple morality scales can make the game better, as they will serve to record such choices or inaction and affect you in more subtle ways, such as in which perks will become available to you. Lets see another examples of how this might work.

Example 2:You are along the wasteland and see a bunch of slavers transporting a bunch of slaves for sale. Helping the slaves would move, lets say your  liberty scale towards liberty. Doing nothing would move it slightly towards domination, buying the slaves and freeing them would move, lets say, your pacifism scale towards peace and so on.

This is an example where doing nothing does not have direct negative consequences (for non-role players that is) but if you really wanted to play a liberty oriented character, ignoring all instances of slavery would likely cause an issue in obtaining some perks or joining some faction and so on.

Example 3: A city you are visiting is being attacked by raiders. You help drive them back but then the townspeople drive off and capture the remaining ones. When they come back, they decide to turn them into their slaves as punishment for their crimes. Allowing this to stand will decrease your liberty scale but increase your justice scale. Trying to stop this would increase your liberty scale but might ruin your relations with the city. Joining the hunting party might decrease your liberty scale even more.

This kinds of actions will allow you to flesh out and move your character to a specific orientation even if you’re not particularly interested in role playing (i.e. if you haven’t decided before hand what your personality will be). Then as the game progresses, you can see how what actions come to your naturally affect the views of everyone else about your character. You may think for example that you only work for a fair price but others might see you as uncaring and slavery supporting (because you didn’t free those poor slaves). Or you may think that you are someone who protects the weak, but you also end up looking  domineering.

In short, I hope my examples clarified that morality in video games should not simply be about material rewards but about making players realize that there’s no easy answers that one can pick as the “good” or “bad” ones and even neutrality has a cost. By making these effects either indirect or simply leave them to the imagination of the player, we can provide the basis for some interesting thinking as well as the opportunity for a good role play experience.

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How can we design a fulfilling moral system for a video game?

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RPGs are the perfect art medium to explore moral issues. Here are some of my thoughts on how we can move towards this.

I recently started replaying Fallout 3 but this time with the addition of a few truly excellent modifications. I won’t got much into this other than to say that Fallout 3 seems to be 100% better when modded but the main thing that  struck me as I was going through the quests is how unfulfilling the moral choices and the relevant moral system is.  It’s nothing more than a Good/Evil scale which seems to telepathically travel around the world making everyone have similar reaction to your character.

I can’t help but be disappointed by it, especially for a game which for some reason has been praised for its wealth of moral options. I guess this is to a large extent due to its open nature and the number of side-quests to take which generally devolves to helping some person for free, helping some person for a reward, or killing them and taking their stuff. Much of this is caused of course by the limitations imposed by full voice acting but that doesn’t change the fact that one feels severely restricted.

Fallout does better than most still, you often have a choice on how to help them and so on, but then the arbitrary karma rewards/punishments come around and travel telepathically around the world which really takes away from the immersion. Fortunately I have a mod which can hide the Karma messages but I can’t escape their effects which makes it very weird when a village I’ve saved from certain doom starts being hostile to me because I murdered a tribe of cannibals and took their stuff, on the other side of the world.

The only way I’ve figured I can immerse myself in such a game is to decide before hand what my alignment will be in terms of a few ambiguous moral rules and stick to them, come what may. For example in the current iteration for example, I’m trying to play a “the needs of the many overweight the rights of the few” kind of character, who is also extremely xenophobic in terms of “weirdos” (i.e. all that are not “proper” humans) and see where that gets me. This leads me to be very nice and fuzzy to humans but extremely callous and downright evil to everyone else. Karma can’t represent this in any meaningful way and thus I end up stuck in the middle as “neutral citizen”, while my relations to most people, human or not, are generally cold. This only is interesting because I keep the experiences of my character in my own imagination as the game does not provide me with any real effect from my actions and even then, the game insists on making things difficult.

For example, in the scenario with the Cannibals Raiders above, I managed to let me talk to their leader at some point but there was no possible combination of dialogue to make them hostile to me once they became friendly. Sure, I could choose between 3 different options to resolve the quest I was in peacefully (all pretty much similar), but none of them fit the personality I’d chosen for my character: The fact that I do not deal with freaks and especially cannibals. There wasn’t even a dialogue choice I could choose to tell them that I was about to wipe them from the face of the earth. I could only proceed to an unprovoked attack which more so ended up triggering a game bug making me fail my quest if I didn’t do it right.

So I started thinking how this could possibly be improved in some significant way so as to capture the more complex effects of my morality. I had a few ideas but then I found this video online and I noticed that it had expressed a part of my thoughts very concisely.

So obviously the concept of factions would go a long way to make the moral system more realistic. Just imagine if one faction asked you to perform a quest which went against the interests of another faction who, when you ended up causing them enough trouble, would mark you as KOS or something. Or if one faction improved their impression of you after word that you wiped out their enemies spread around. Fallout 2 in fact had this, where the reputation system kept track of how each settlement viewed you but in this third iteration, they decided to dumb down the game to the simple good/evil dichotomy.

But further than factions, I’m thinking that games are truly the artistic means where it’s the best way to explore moral issues. Books and movies can only give you a perspective but it’s limited by the ideas of the author and how much one can identify with the characters. However RPGs are made for identifying with the main characters and the freedom to explore paths we wouldn’t normally experience or choose allows for some really interesting thoughts.

Imagine for example, if instead of one Good vs Evil scale, we had more than one, not necessarily as a graph like the video above suggest, but rather as separate counters which moved to either side depending on your actions in the world. Lets imagine for example a gender equality scale where a new character starts in the middle. Depending on the character’s interaction with males or females of the world (i.e. you should get on occasion phrases which allowed you to marginalize particular genders, such as dismissing the opinion of a female or something) this counter would move in either direction.

Now lets say that you have started acting like a misogynist. Initially you would have a few dialogue options which would allow you to move your scale to ther misogynist side of the scale. As you started to move towards it, more and more of your dialogue options would involve being outright sexist, until for example, you wouldn’t be able to refer to females without calling them “chicks” or “bitches”, even to their face. Now obviously this should create friction in the interaction with the women of the world and even a lot of the males through their dialogue, making for example feminist storekeepers have higher prices, women companions desert you and so on.  On the other hand, you could make it so that the player who reaches the far ends of misogyny be eligible for special perks (like the one which is already in the game giving extra damage vs females), special quests and so on. The fact that the initial steps one made into misogyny (i.e. the dialogue options one selected) might not be obvious and yet eventually the player discovers him/herself having progressed towards it might be an interesting result for people who have not even considered how their words and behaviour can be perceived. Not only does this make an interestnig role playing experience, but it might provide people with a new perspective.

Likewise, someone staying in the middle of the scale, at equality, could also be eligible for a perk and might get positive reactions from similarly minded people or factions or negative reactions from sexists.

Other similar scales could easily explore stuff such as racism (even if that is limited to the fantasy races of the game like Super Mutants and Ghouls) freedom of personal choice, mutual aid, respect for property, charity and so on. Therefore, you would not have good or evil characters but you could have a more detailed map of a personality which would be really tough to claim as simply good or evil.

For example. how would you label a person who is really strong in standing by and protecting his people but does not respect those who do not follow traditional values or are not human? How about the one who respects the individuality of everyone but sees all interactions with others through monetary exchanges? How about the one who believes that might makes right and that the more powerful deserve to rule but that one should always protect those who cannot protect themselves?

Most people would probably find a mix of good and bad aspects in each of these examples and the good about an RPG is that it allows you to Role Play such a character and see the world through their eyes. Sure, this is nonetheless limited by the developer’s creativity and possibly impossible to properly represent in the dialogue of a full-voice acted game but even so, you can still go at least halfway through a faction system plus specialised abilities and quests in case someone reaches an extreme moral value.

I hope we’ll see something like this in the future or even better, perhaps this is something that could be modded into the already existing games. Certainly when one can implement a scale for good and evil, one can also implement 3 scales for the moral values they’d like to explore in their game. One could even go for more, but as the video above mentioned, sometimes exploring only a particular moral value can be far deeper than a shallow good vs evil concept which cheapens the morality of the game rather than enrich it.

Ryzom finally free

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Ryzom has finally been liberated. It took just 4 years but I never would have thought it would finally happen!

European Retail box for The Saga of Ryzom.
Image via Wikipedia

Do you still remember Ryzom? the MMORPG that was closing back in 2006, was attempted to have its source liberated by the Free Software enthusiasts, got taken over by another company, which subsequently bankrypted and the whole thing stalled? Well it seems that finally, 4 years after the original suggestion was made, Ryzom has been released into the wild as a pure Affero GPL3 Free Software, assets and everything. Exciting!

I just got an email announcing this and even though it took a helluva long time to get this through, it’s nevertheless better than never. Since I’ve covered this subjects twice in the Division by Zer0 already, I thought I should at least announce this exciting development and finally close this chapter of the saga.

I am extremely glad that this has finally happened. I’m very interested if the liberation of the code will manage to re-energize a game which has been practically on life-support for the past 4 years (and wasn’t doing very well before that anyway). I’m interested to see if the first completely free software game which can arguably be called to be of commercial quality, will manage to make any kind of effect in the MMORPG area.

Now that the doors are open, it can be extended in ways that were never considered or followed due to cost constraints. The community can finally start fixing the bugs and then add custom content which can quickly be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.The Affero GPL license will make certain that the improvement made on the game and the code will be shared back to the community for all to enjoy.

The biggest problem is naturally that the game’s code and graphics will be quite dated by now as the game was initially released in 2004 and commercial development seems to have stopped since 2006. The good thing is that it’s now free nature will not require it to compete for price with the big commercial games and the bazaar development it will follow should hopefully allow it to challenge them for content. Still, the huge delay of 4 years and the understandable death of its community in this time will be very hard to recover.

Lets try it out and hope for the best.

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If you want my support, why don't you give me the code?

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A new development company recently announced its attempts to crowdfund its upcoming game. I explain why it makes sense to Open Source it as well.

I just heard about the upcoming Diablo-contender game Grim Dawn which is still in its early development and has now dipped its feet into the concept of crowdfunding. That is a step in the right direction but I feel not enough to convince. You see, I’m a fan of Action RPG games (or more aptly called Diablo Clones) and I’ve even been playing Titan Quest the last few days as well but I see no reason to put my money on a game coming out 1 year from now just to “show my support.” Where is the mutual aid? Why are people asked to fund a company’s ventures but then expected to not receive any of the benefits any publisher or venture capitalist would get? Ownership.

When a publisher funds a game, they end up owning all the “IP” behind it. The copyrights, the trademarks, everything. The developer doesn’t get to keep anything, which is incidentally when developing companies go under, the actual team behind them cannot keep working on the settings they created. We end up with stuff like games truly deserving of a sequel simply disappearing. As such, it’s very worthwhile to try and get away from such a restrictive contract if possible.

However to jump from that to a concept of crowdfunding where you get to keep all the benefits and take none of the risks just strikes me as very unfair for those actually putting their money on the line. Not only do I give my money one year in advance, without knowing the quality of what I get or even if I get anything at all, but all I get is a license to play the game I funded? Does this seem  like a good deal to any you? Personally, I feel like a sucker.

If you want to crowdsource or crowdfund your ventures, then you’d better be willing to give something back to those who help you. And no, simply a license to play the game is not enough. You’d better give us the code in the form of free software. In short, if you do a public venture, it’s only fair that you create a public content. Not only will you then show that you are willing to meet those helping you half-way, not only will you ensure to those taking the risks (i.e. putting their money on the line) that they will get to keep whatever you started even if you get hit by a bus, but you also create a feeling of goodwill which will go a long way in making people willing to support you.

And not only that, but you will also get free support and development from the community you’ve become a part of.

The downside? If your game becomes insanely successful, you won’t end up swimming in money but with games like Diablo 3 coming out in the same year and you being a small-time developer, do you think that’s a possibility? You will still be able to sell your game just fine but you’ll simply have to find a way to give people a reason to buy. WIll that be dedicated online servers and scarce material goods? More likely. Will you end up losing the revenue from trying to sell a bunch of bytes? Sure, but then again, you got your money beforehand and those who want to support you will do so anyway, as they do with any free software project (of which many survive with substantial donations). Those who wouldn’t pay any money and simply play the gratis version are the sames who would pirate the game anyway.

Think about it. It makes sense to free your code if you go down this path. Think of the goodwill. I know for a fact that if you announced that the game would be licensed under the GPL, I’d already have given you my money and so would many others. Think of the free publicity from all the free software and open source related sites that announced this bold move of yours, from all those free software enthusiasts which now join your ranks of ARPG enthusiasts to spread the word of mouth. Think of freedom and the fact that your game will survive and continue to improve no matter the money.

UPDATE: I posted a link to this post on the official fora and an initial response seems to indicate that opening the source is impossible since the game is built over the proprietary Titan Quest engine. If this is indeed the case, it is very unfortunate as it takes the free software licensing just out of the table altogether. This again points out the problems with building a game on a proprietary engine or base. If the engine of the game was open sourced, it would have been improved and updated by the community and new ARPG built on it relatively cheap, creating a wealth of such games to play. See the Quake3 engine for example.

Also, it’s worth noting that GNU/Linux support is not planned.

EDIT2: Thread was closed, so even if you do want to argue a point, you now can’t. This personally does not fill me with any confidence.

The demographics of piracy, PCs and consoles

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Game Companies think that by focusing their energies on consoles instead of PCs they’ll be making more secure profits from piracy. If only they understood their audience…

Rally in Stockholm, Sweden, in support of file...
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As TweakGuide’s examination of piracy continues, he takes a look at some of the numbers around file-sharing for each platform and find correlations from there. I will not attempt to dispute the numbers themselves, even though one can make some very valid criticisms about his methodologies which many went ahead and did here ((Simple Example: His number for downloads from Mininova is way, way off. This is the times a .torrent file has been downloaded, not the number of times the full, working game has been downloaded. Very often a particular torrent will not include a working copy, or its swarm will not be fast enough, or simply another torrent will look to be of higher quality. Add to that the file scrapping that Torrent search sites do with each other all the time, and you figure out that his numbers might easily be 1/10th of what he thinks they are. The Torrentfreak numbers are a far better indicator but of course, he interpreted them absolutely wrong.)). The reason there is no point is disputing the numbers is firstly because it’s the impression that game companies have of the numbers (and that would be similar to the author’s) and also because I’ll attempt to show that even when the numbers stand, it’s his analysis of what they mean that is flawed.

The reason for this is that TweakGuide does not seems to realize that the dynamics of the crowd of PC gaming are not the same as of consoles or how those dynamics change when these two overlap. Before one can analyze the situation, they need to recognise the difference in demographics between those two markets and how it affects puchasing behaviour and the rate of perceived piracy.

Here’s what we need to consider

PCs are proliferated all over the world

The fact of the matter is that not all the world has such a big middle and upper-middle class as the USA has, and this means a few things.

First there quite a lot of PCs that are capable of gaming but not purchased explicitly for this purpose. It’s quite often that a family will have a PC purchased for the use of everyone (business, online shopping, social networking, studies etc) which can then easily be turned into a gaming-capable machine by the simply addition of a decent graphic card. Since the need for such a PC can very often be necessary (say for business or school) it’s something prioritized over an explicitly gaming console, plus it’s not out of the budget of most families, even in developing nations ((This information shows that even in the poorer nations, 1 PC per 10 people is not uncommon. Thus Their middle class is very likely to own a gaming-capable PC)). This means that quite a few people who want to game have primarily access to a PC rather than a console.

However most of those people are not wealthy enough to purchase games to go with it. Especially teenagers which are on a limited budget but have an insatiable appetite for new games, not to mention for playing whatever their friends are, are left with the only option to pirate. Usually this is done locally and not via Downloads, although with the proliferation of high-bandwidth lines even in poorer nations, this is changing. Think of it like this, if you have a PC at home only and enough money to buy the latest-greatest game per month, would you give up all the other games? Even when salivating adverts about them are all around you?

That is exacerbated even more when we consider that nations outside the 1st world have far smaller incomes while the prices of games do not tend to drop accordingly. This forces gamers to turn even more starkly towards piracy as a means of getting their gaming fix. This is only to be expected as price is indeed the main reason most turning to file-sharing and not the infantile argument anti-piracy lobbyists use of “they are just immoral free riders”. This is the reason why piracy is largest in the more cash-strapped nations in general.

What I mean to show by all this is that the reasons PCs by far lead the numbers in piracy is because there’s far more PCs available in the poorer countries than consoles and because they are poorer and cannot afford the exorbitant prices of PC Games, they turn to piracy. Thus the numbers of downloads we see  are representative of the fact that people download all around the world and not just from the developed nations and primarily for the PC.

Consoles are primarily owned by those with spare income

While a PC is becoming more and more of a necessity in everyday life due to the increasing importance of online communication and services, consoles are instead becoming more and more of a luxury. It has always been the case that the console itself was cheap because it was making the money up via the license for the games sold but the recent consoles have not only steadily increased in price by themselves (to the point where you can get an OK gaming PC for a comparable price) but in order to take full advantage of their capabilities, you currently also need an HD TV, which relatively few can afford.

Originally things were different of course, when the first and second generation of consoles was coming out, PC were still quite expensive and not a lot of people had one at all. Thus to get a complete PC for gaming, including a monitor and peripherals could rise up to the thousands. A console OTOH required a few hundred in investment and you could plug it in your TV. It was a cheaper solution, especially in a time when piracy was not as easy or widespread. Roles now seem to have reversed somewhat, or at worst equalized. A Console along with peripherals and a few new games can easily take you to half a grand (and that’s by being generous and using current console prices), and if you include an HDTV in the mix, you quickly fly over a grand.

As weird as it may seem to those of you still living in a comfortable middle-class bubble, not many can afford this. An expenditure like this, can easily take up the whole recreation budget some have for the whole year. As a result, those who do get such setups, are also the ones who can afford to buy games legally just as well. And this shows in the rates of piracy of course.

Where Demographics collide

Of course, there’s a very big section of people who own both a gaming-capable PC and one or more consoles at the same time and here, the things get even more interesting.

Certainly someone who can afford two or more gaming stations has spare income to be buying games legally in the first place. Someone who gets a console is more than likely to get it as his “legal” and hassle-free gaming station since they also have the benefit that games just work out of the box and they don’t ever have to wonder about virii, serials and DRM, or their OS breaking. Of course the PC could still be used to be able to play those types of games that just don’t work that well on a console. If that person also happens to be a hardcore gamer who enjoys playing a lot of different games, it’s quite possible that he’ll reach time, if not money constraints at some point.

Now if that person is to pirate (To be able to play the game as a demo or simply to save money,) where do you think he would do it? Would he take his console to be chipped and risk getting discovered and losing access to many of the features of his console? (eg. multiplayer, warranty etc), or would he download the PC version which requires very little effort and risk to get working? I think we all know the answer to that. Thus, even though it’s the same person doing the pirating, and even though this piracy may eventually lead to a console sale (if he likes it enough to play it legally, or on a nice HD TV), the PC piracy gets inflated once more and talks about “economic loss” are once again brought up.

PC Gamers are more demanding

Finally one thing that deserves notice in order to understand why the PC Game piracy is higher is the increased  demands of the users of this platform. You see PC gaming had always different and more open standards than console gaming and this grew out of the nature of each platform. Consoles, from the begging have been extremely locked-down and locked-in, even to the point of special custom cartidges incompatible with anything else, modifications to the games adding extra value where practically impossible to make or distribute and in general user freedom was curtailed. This was counterbalanced with hassle-free gaming, low learning curves and initial low costs (i.e. if one does not take into account the increased costs of games.) As such, they tended to attract the kind of user who would be quite willing to sacrifice freedom for convenience. “I know my machine could do so much more, but I don’t personally care for them so I won’t demand it.”

On the other hand, The hackable nature of the PC allowed customization and expansion of games and empowered users to add extra value, far beyond the original. Furthermore, because PC multiplayer was inherently tied to the rise of the internet (as opposed to the living room split-screen in the case of consoles) it also inherited many of the aspects of the distributed, decentralized and free nature of the net. Thus individual servers for FPS, planets, modding communities, balance patches, and of course the more novel, demanding and complex games. All of this meant that the PC gamer had and still generally has quite high standards on what he should be able to do with stuff he is using. The rise in popularity of Free Software and of the more customer-focused companies has only served to increase their expectations.

So when a company attempts to introduce console mentality into the PC market, it is only natural that it faces a backlash which becomes only more intense if and when the company does an action which the PC gaming community opposes vocally. This can easily be seen by the classic by now example of Spore which instated draconian DRM and delivered a sub-par game, based on the notion that marketing alone was enough to carry them through. The most recent example was of course CoDMW2 which removed the ability for custom servers, something which they were warned would create a strong backlash. And so it did as the game soon became the most pirated game of 2009 within a few months. Not simply because it was good or popular, but also because PC gamers, quite explicitly, did it as a punishing act.

Look at the rest of the top pirated games of 2008 or 2009 and you’ll notice the same trend. The top games are those which are released for both PC and console and if anything include many options that PC gamers are not fans of. Restrictive DRMs, Missing basic features, Console-based control systems or setup, DLC-focused etc. This should point out the principled basis for this kind of piracy. It’s not based on simply wanting to get a game for free, but rather on the wish of PC gamers to make companies understand that their actions are unpopular. Unfortunately companies choose to interpret this a different way.

Bringing it all together

How does this all affect the arguments of TweakGuide? He’s basically saying that because of the disparity in the ratio of piracy to legal PC games and piracy to legal Console games, PC game developers are starting to switch their efforts to consoles and even making them their primary development platform. Accordingly we’re either going to stop seeing as many big-budget games for the PC, or they’re going to be developed with consoles in mind and therefore lose in quality, performance or taking advantage of the PC capabilities.

This is of course a bad move for their part as they are only going to worsen their sales and piracy, not increase them, and this of course will further exacerbate the issue, leading to them publishing even worse PC games, leading to more piracy and less sales etc etc.

You see, those who make the majority of pirates, the ones who simply cannot afford the huge prices for games, will not suddenly discover the money to buy a console. They will simply keep looking for the highest quality game they can get for free or for a price they can afford. If the big budget titles move exclusively to consoles, then they’ll simply won’t get them and settle for the indie and open source alternatives. If the big budget titles remove features and worsen the customization, the free or low cost alternatives are simply going to look as a better thing to play. The poor are simply incapable of getting more money for games. Naturally this means that those gaming companies have shot themselves in the foot since even the poor will shell out some money if you give them a reason to buy and the correct price. If you are not willing to do it for fear of losing control, then someone else will. Whatever happens, you’re not going to be making money out of them but rather facilitating others to doing so.

On the other hand, by focusing all their energy on consoles instead, they will start to over-saturate an already full market. Console gamers may have more disposable income but they are relatively few and have only so much time they can spend on gaming. Start churning out more games for the consoles and you’ll quickly find out that it’s the sales per individual game which start to suffer while you’ve now lost all income from the PC market. Sure, some PC gamers will switch to consoles so that they may play the big budget and exclusives but only the ones who can afford to in the first place. I doubt it will be a significant amount.

For those who have already both a gaming rig and a console, not much will change. At best they’ll switch to playing free games, or those who are given at an appropriate price for their value, or they’ll simply chip their console or buy a secondary chipped one so that they may keep pirating for demos or gratis. If anything, console piracy will increase.

And finally, those who are simply demanding of the stuff their games provide, of the modding capacity and the free support and quality service, if anything this will drive them even further away from console-type games and they will turn instead of those companies who know to give them what they expect. Companies such as Valve and Stardock and Runic and Blizzard. And if those alternatives are not enough, perhaps they’ll finally discover the possibilities of Free Software.

The large companies may think they’re protecting their interests and punishing a disloyal crowd, but their inability to understand their demographics is only going to hurt them in the long run. Naturally they won’t realize this as it’s nice to be able to say that the percentage of piracy is low, even while your total profits are lower. After all, they are misguided enough to whine about piracy hurting them…while recording record sales year after year.

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How I spent my afternoon yesterday.

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Reddit convinced me to get Dragon Age legally rather than Pirating it. This is the true story of what followed.

So I get home from work yesterday and get on Reddit…

.

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Dragon Age FFFUUU

Yes, this really happened to me yesterday exactly as you see it.

Other fun facts

  • I got the VPN yesterday in an attempt to allow myself to buy the goddamn game. Legally. That was a wasted 40 Euros of course but hopefully I’ll be able to use it to watch restricted content. Or you know, maybe not.
  • I didn’t download the whole game at 300Kb/s fortunately. I watched a movie for the first 2 hours which allowed the 1.2 Mb/s to continue. However when the movie finished I tried to surf the net while the last 5% where downloading. Then my speed dropped to 300Kb/s and never got over it, thus making the last 8 minutes into 30.
  • Yes, my PC did really die within 5 minutes of downloading the game. It was the PSU which gave up the ghost. Hopefully nothing else has been affected from it.
  • Of course EA screwed me over by charging the same amount in Euros as they charge in Dollars. Exchange rates be damned.
  • I’ve only managed to see the intro screen of Dragon Age and the first few stages of character creation.

And then people ask why Piracy is the better choice…

Can self-moderation of a game community reduce abuse and dickwadery?

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Can a game community repair its internal social relation through self-moderation or is it doomed to fucktardery by the few. I believe the concept of Direct Action can help.

PA's Greater Internet Dickwad theoryI’ve recently entered the beta for an upcoming DotA (almost-)clone called Heroes of Newerth (HoN) when I discovered through reddit giving away 100 of ’em for the most absurd names (I submitted the Flying Spaghetti Monster of course). I always wanted to play the DotA experience but I didn’t have Warcraft3 available and Demigod is quite different from it (and a bit disappointing as well). Plus, having a native GNU/Linux client was an offer I couldn’t resist. 😉

But what does this have to do with the title above? Well one of the main issues that DotA has is the sheer number of elitist assholes who heave tons of abuse at people trying to learn the ropes or even just don’t play perfectly. I am talking total nerd-rage here. Unfortunately, this mentality seems to have migrated to the HoN community, most likely because it’s been marketed as the intellectual sequel to DotA (Items and Heroes are almost the same).

While this general level of fucktardery is not such a big issue in a free mod such as DotA, for a commercial game with developers to pay and with big plans for the future, it might make or break their life-expectancy. The less people that are interested in nurturing and increasing their “newbie scene”, the less people will stick around until they won’t be at a level where they suffer abuse simply for not having climbed the (very steep) learning curve.

As I was reading similar sentiments from other people in the fora, I got to thinking on how those who would like to help new players might overcome this obstacle and alleviate, if not reduce the rampart dickwadery. While technical solutions might be proposed and coded, such as improving the match-making system, I think the solution lies in direct action and cooperation from the community.

Of course the community cannot take very good action without the game presenting at least some tools to combat the problem, which is incidentally why the DotA community is what it is. Fortunately, even at this beta stage, the game has some controls that could be used for such purposes. Permaban and Ignore. If I understand the first one correctly, one can mark a specific account as always banned from games one hosts. Ignore just…well, ignores chat messages from a particular player.

So how can these two be used for self-moderation? My idea was through a blacklist. Lets say that a known newbie-friendly player (lets call him/her a ‘Mentor’) while playing in a newb-only game, discovers that one of his team members is constantly ranting and cursing at the others for being worthless, n00bs, sucky and whatnot. The Mentor then, grabs a few screencaps or a replay as evidence of this and adds the dickwad’s alias to a blacklist he maintains. This can be as simply as a blog with each new post being about a particular dickwad and a full list in a prominent location.

Now all the other people who have a likewise mentality, ie they like to promote a healthier community are subscribed to this blacklist. Each time a new person is added to it, people judge the evidence and if solid ((Although of course, if the Mentor or the maintainers of the blacklist are trusted, many will not even need to look at the evidence)), they add this account to their permaban and ignore lists. If just a 10% of the HoN people are subscribed to this blacklist, then the abusive players are going to quickly start running into problems joining games or talking to people.

The effects of this tactic would be akin to peer pressure in a normal social situation. Suddenly the dickwads are going to find out that being a jerk online has some drawbacks. Hopefully some might reconsider as generally, not being a dickwad is not so difficult. They should be then given a chance to take themselves out of the blacklist (probation time?) and who knows, maybe they’ll join the other side for a change.

So why is this better than simply using system based changes? Well first of all because no programmed system is perfect, especially at catching such vague concepts as dickwadery. Matchmaking may not work well enough and options to mark others as abusive (say via a game function like permaban) may in turn be abused themselves for griefing purposes. On the other hand, a self-moderated solution avoids these issues.

Let’s say for example that someone was added to the dickwads blacklist but some think this was wrong. Perhaps his frustration was warranted, or there is not enough evidence and whatnot. What would probably happen is that not all subscribers to the blacklist would add him as they wouldn’t feel he deserves it. As such his “pain” would be much less. Dialogue will be also had and perhaps more evidence requested.

Lets have another example where the Mentor goes on a power trip and starts adding people he doesn’t like to the blacklist without evidence just because he expects to be trusted. Seeing as this is not anything official, nothing would prevent people from calling him out on this, a new blacklist forked from the old under the supervision of another Mentor or even a collaboration of them and the old Mentor might quickly find himself in a prominent position in the new blacklist.

All of these then are ideas that might work to allow a game community to self-moderate itself to a healthy environment which is conductive to new people joining, without requiring any authoritarian measures on the part of the developers or the moderators. Rather it would be based on direct action by the members themselves and as such far less prone to corruption, who would then get the community they deserve.

Who knows, If I stick around with HoN once it comes out (curse my short attention span) I might actually start this for the heck of it. Just to see if a purely community driven initiative can make a difference. It would be an interest test to put some of my principles under. 😉

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