As I’ve been playing, I’ve noticed that they’ve really tried to turn the production values up to eleven. The terrain feels a lot more detailed, the voice acting is improved (and there are more voice actors), the quests are more detailed and varied, and the game is sprinkled with non-human languages. Notably, the Dragon Language (spoken, obviously, by dragons, and also by the ancient Nords) and the Falmer Language (the Falmer are a race of elves who became blind underground monsters) get considerable attention in various storylines in the game.

But for all that attention, the actual language construction has… mixed results. And since I occasionally like to tear things apart and nit-pick them to death, I thought I’d discuss what they’ve done, and where it succeeds and where it fails.

Building Imaginary Languages

A spoken or written language that is created intentionally (as opposed to most natural languages, which develop organically) is called a constructed language, or conlang. These can be created as fictional languages (well-known examples include Klingon, Na’vi, Quenya) or intended to be used in the real world (Esperanto, Solresol, toki pona). Someone who creates constructed languages is often referred to as a conlanger.

Conlangers are often seen as eccentric nerds who are wasting their time and skill. However, they are employed with increasing frequency by big media producers who want consistent, realistic languages in their fictional universes – Klingon is an early example of this. And, of course, Tolkien is the grandfather of self-indulgent conlanging, creating at least a dozen languages, many with etymological histories, ‘older’ forms of the language with traceable roots, and an amazing attention to detail. Sure, he told some stories, but that was mostly just to give his languages somewhere to live.

Real-world conlangs are often made with optimistic and lofty goals: Esperanto (a fairly early constructed language), for example, was designed to be “an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that transcends nationality and would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto). So, world peace through language. Sadly, 125 years on, we still seem to have a lot of war. Likewise, toki pona is designed to “shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona).

But on to Skyrim…

The Falmer “Language”

The Falmer language is a disappointment. I know it only comes up significantly in one quest line, but still… it’s not even remotely a language of its own, just English text written with an alternate alphabet. Basically, a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. I think I might have preferred untranslatable gibberish to this.

I mean, it’s not that hard to whip together just enough of a constructed language for one quest. I’m not asking for much here, just something a tiny bit more sophisticated. Watch how much we can do in just a few minutes:

Start with the grammar. We can make arbitrary decisions here – no one’s going to fault us for such a simple use case. Let’s pick an SOV word order, with simple inflectional markers for genitive and plurals. Say, add ‘i’ to any word to make it genitive, and ‘o’ to make it plural. Words ending in vowels take ‘ti’ and ‘to’. Simple enough. We’ll also say that the language uses a fairly simple structure, with short sentences and a minimum of relative clauses. Where prepositional phrases occur, we will let them retain their natural English word order unless there is some obvious reason to use SOV.

So, take the first sentence of the original encoded text. In our new language (keeping English vocabulary for now, but simplifying a bit) it looks like:

MERCER FREY MYTI EVERY STEP ELUDES.

The next step would be to make up some vocabulary; there aren’t that many words used in the original text, so it should be pretty easy to cook that up. Even an amateur conlanger like me could make something at least mildly interesting in just a couple of hours. And more importantly, it would give us a translated text with a consistent feel (it would flow like a natural language) but without falling back on something quite as obvious as basic substitution. And tools can automate a lot of our work – if we keep the original text simple enough, we could even just use sed or perl (or another search/replace solution) to do most of the heavy lifting.

You could argue that it is Gallus’ ‘encoded’ journal, but the story makes a big deal about the fact that it was written in Ancient Falmer, which is So Terribly Hard to translate and makes it super secure. Anyone, given a few hours, could work out “he’s used some other alphabet to write words in my language”.

And sure, there are a lot of quests, and I don’t know how big their design team was. Maybe a couple hours was too long to spend fleshing this out. But it’s still a disappointment. I suppose decoding the message is a nice easter egg, but an easter egg that required digging deeper would have been more interesting to me.

Dragon Language

The Dragon Language, on the other hand, is used much more extensively – there are numerous writings in it throughout the world, the dragons and draugr will speak in it (as combat taunts, in particular), and the protagonist (along with several NPCs) can use special ‘shouts’ that are formed from words in the language.

With increased visibility came an increased attempt to make a language that makes sense. While the dragon language, like Falmer, has its own script, the script isn’t just used to encode English; every time that script appears, it translates into something intelligible in the Dragon Language.

And the resulting language is a lot more interesting than Falmer. The grammar is very similar to English, but not identical. Word order is almost the same, but plurals inflect differently, and there is no case system (at least not that we see in the game), which is a bit lazy and feels like the result of a rushed production schedule.

Obviously we have a very small vocabulary available – there isn’t *that* much written or spoken Dragon Language in the game. But still, some of the word forms are interesting. One that struck me on an initial overview is one of the most well-known and widely used words, dov. Dov means ‘dragonkind’, as in the entire race of dragons. The word for a single dragon is Dovah. Now, ah means ‘hunter’, but “hunter of dragonkind” doesn’t feel right. So, this isn’t a simple compound word. I suspect the conlanger was going for ‘ah’ here being rooted in aan, the indefinite article in Dragon Language, with some morphological drift (which is especially likely with very common words, and since ‘dovah’ would basically be the dragons’ word for ‘person’, this is likely). This is an impressive touch – it shows that some real attention to detail was paid when choosing words for the vocabulary (instead of the usual fantasy conlang approach of ‘string syllables together more or less at random’).

Looking at the wider vocabulary, the language tends to form a lot of compound words, in a manner similar to German. I initially thought that some of its vocabulary was pulled from either Old Norse or modern Icelandic, but on further inspection I think that’s just random collision. The pronoun system is suitably complex as to feel natural. It is also quite distinct from English.

Another thing worth remarking on is that the Nords are a visibly Scandinavian people. The word Draugr, for instance, is an Old Norse word, although it is used a bit incorrectly in Skyrim (the word is used similarly to ‘mummy’ in Skyrim, but the original meaning is closer to ‘zombie’ or perhaps ‘revenant’). So, I am assuming that the Dragon Language is intended to sound Scandinavian, because it does. Even without obviously basing its vocabulary on any Scandinavian language, it pulls off the trick of really sounding Norse. The creators of the language have a good ear for phonology.

If I have one real criticism of Dragon Language, it’s the name. We don’t have anything better than ‘Dragon Language’ to work with. Either Dov’um or Dovzul would have been decent choices. Both can translate roughly to ‘dragon voice’.

Like I said above: Bethesda really pushed the production values on this game. There is a lot of wonderful attention to detail that shines through in this game. The Dragon Language is a good example of that.

The day is rainy and grey, but bright in that clean Spring way where the contrast between everything is sharpened and it feels like you can see forever. I drive in the rain to NC State campus, a twenty minute drive through the odd combination of semi-urban and rural landscape that makes up Raleigh. Once on campus, I’m a bit confused – GPS helps me get to the right general area, but I’ve lost my GPS signal now and end up parked in a deserted-feeling area in front of a row of buildings. There is no one else walking around here, and as I’m looking around and trying to get my bearings I hear a rumbling noise. On the far side of the road, a train goes rushing by on tracks I hadn’t noticed.

The lack of people and the light rain and the sudden noise – suddenly everything feels surreal, just to the left of normal. It’s a dizzying experience – this always happens when I am stepping into the unknown, especially when I don’t have anyone familiar nearby. It isn’t a negative sensation, though; it’s pleasant in an “I might be stepping into fairyland and I may never find my way back” sort of way. I check my phone, which has gotten its GPS lock back, and realize I need to drive a block further. I spot a sign for the building I’m looking for, and park.

The surreal feeling persists as I cross the street. I realize I’m at the back of the building, which explains why things feel so deserted. I find the front entrance, and enter to find… a deserted building. No one in the lobby, no signs posted, and no obvious Go-related activity occurring. I check my email (thank the gods for smartphones) and realize I missed a detail – room 404. Great. I’ll never find it.

I do find an elevator, though, and while I wait for it several other people arrive, obviously Go players (exactly how this is obvious is lost on me, but it is clear they are Go players). One of them, an older man, smiles at me in greeting, and with that, normalcy returns.

Setup

The tournament takes about an hour to get going. The organizers seem to be having trouble with their tournament software. While we wait, I say hi to the players I know from the Triangle Go Club, and end up in a conversation with someone who is about my age. We start to play a warm-up game. He gives me 9 stones, and I’m doing pretty well about 50 moves in, when we notice that the tournament organizers have set up a projector and are projecting the first round pairings. We clean up our game, and I grab a bottle of water and head over to my assigned table.

Round 1

My first game is against Andrew, rank 15 kyu. Andrew is young – probably no older than 12. He is also very polite: He introduces himself and shakes my hand before he sits down.

As I entered at 19 kyu, I have black with 3 handicap stones. I had a chance during my warm-up game to figure out how the Ing bowls work, but it takes me a minute to work out how to program and use the game clock¹. They’re pretty intuitive, though, and I am soon hearing an amazingly cheerful voice (it reminds me of Sumomo) telling me my timer has started counting. Since I have handicap stones, my opponent actually goes first, so I immediately press my button to make it white’s turn, and hear the same message repeated again, with ‘White’ in place of ‘Black’.

Andrew plays his first move in less than a second. This isn’t too surprising – in a 3 stone handicap game, playing the 4th hoshi is an obvious opening move. I respond aggressively, approaching his stone, and now the tournament really feels underway. I throw myself into the mental space of Go, of territory and influence, attack and counter-attack.

Andrew responds almost immediately to every move I make, while I feel lumbering by comparison, often thinking for several seconds before responding. This trend continues throughout the game, and his fast moves make me feel like I need to respond equally fast, which leads to several mistakes.

His play is surprising – he pretty much discards joseki and instead favours attaching to any approach move I make. I’m admittedly weak against strange openings – even if they’re technically weaker, I haven’t seen them as much and so the best response isn’t obvious and automatic.

More importantly, Andrew is very good, especially at local fighting. I cede more and more territory, and lose several sizable groups of stones. My opponent is the tide and I fall back before his steady and relentless onslaught. I know enough about the game to build a seawall, though, and eventually the board starts to settle. Then I see it – a critical point in one of my opponent’s shape in the south-west side of the board that, if I can play there, will kill two large groups, giving me some 40 points. It’s monumental, and it could turn the tide of the game. And it’s my opponent’s turn. If he sees the weakness and plays the point, these stones will be alive.

My hands start to shake, and I can feel my pulse in my neck, speeding up. My face flushes, and I’m afraid I might actually break into a sweat. Adrenaline. I’ve always had strong adrenaline reactions, but I’ve learned to usually keep up a calm front in the face of an adrenaline storm. Still, I feel light-headed and it’s hard to think.

I stare at a different part of the board, afraid of drawing his attention to the weakness.

He makes his move, attacking my stones in the northeast corner. A few points there doesn’t matter, though. This play is bigger. I put my stone on the board firmly, and it makes a satisfying click. I press the game clock, and it chirps, signaling to Andrew that it is his turn.

The game is over shortly after this. After some confusion about how to count, we calculate the score. Even with my 40-point comeback, I lose by 20 points. Still, I feel like this is a good result. He was clearly better than me, and I had some really clever play near the end.

Round 2

I finish the first game pretty early, and have a chance to watch the other games and socialize with other players who have already finished. After everyone is done, it takes the organizers a while to enter the results and pair up the contestants for the next round. This is a repeated theme throughout the tournament, but I don’t mind – it’s a good chance to rest my mind and let my nerves calm down a little.

This time I’m up against Larry, another young player. He is ranked at 20 kyu, so we play an even game, with Larry taking black and me taking white. Larry is very intense; he doesn’t say hi, just sits down and we begin playing.

After the first round, I’m expecting to have to fight hard in this tournament, so I play very aggressively at first, overextending myself a bit. It quickly becomes apparent that I have a strong advantage in both tactical and strategic play. There are still several tricky points, and I manage to kill a large group with some pretty clever play.

The clock is running pretty low – I have less than two minutes of thinking time remaining. The smell of pizza intrudes – I’m starving. Most of the games have finished, and people are walking around while they eat. Several of the younger players are whispering nearby.. Needless to say, this is a distraction. I’m not blaming this for what happens next, but it was probably a factor. I make a huge mistake and let my opponent revive a large dead group. This probably costs me 30 points.

But I’ve taken all the corners and three of the sides, and pushed a wedge into the center. I win easily, by 76 points. I would suggest that Larry overestimated his strength, except he finished the tournament 3-1. I suppose my play style was just strong against his.

Round 3

Next comes some surprisingly delicious spinach pizza (in the sense that spinach pizza is not usually delicious) and Yet More Difficulty generating pairings. Now the problem is obvious – the children are competing as part of teams, so that their totaled wins and losses are considered. The pairing code doesn’t have a way to represent this, though, so the organizers are manually re-pairing the team members so that they don’t face each other.

I get paired with Dale, a stronger player than me – I take a 4 stone handicap. Dale is an older man, and the only adult I play against in the tournament. He is sociable and friendly, and this puts me at my ease, a relief after the previous two rounds.

Dale plays in a more relaxed style than Andrew (the only other game in which I had a handicap), and I’m able to make some pretty solid play against him. It is a very peaceful game until the end – only a small handful of captures. Still, the game is very intense and intricate as we test each other’s weak spots.

When the board feels settled, Dale keeps studying it, running his time down to less than a minute. Then he makes a desperate invasion into the widest part of my territory. I know he’s a stronger player, so I take a long time to respond. This stretches the game out for several more minutes as I carefully try to avoid mistakes. My fortifications hold, though, and his invasion fails.

The total comes to 67 points for me, and 65 points for him. We count again – it turns out he missed a space in his territory. 67 to 66. I win by a single point. This is the closest game of Go I’ve ever played.

Round 4

Even though I’m in one of the last games to finish in round 3, I know it will take a while to get the next round set up, so I take a walk to stretch. The rest of the floor is quiet – a couple students in a computer lab, and two of the young girls from the tournament playing in one of the study lounges. It strikes me how cold it is in the hall – I didn’t notice how warm it was in the room where the tournament is being held. Too many bodies.

I return to the room just as things are getting set up. I look up at the projector that shows the matches, and find my name.

I’ve been paired with a 27 kyu player, and I’m giving her a 7-stone handicap. The tournament organizer actually walks over and apologizes. He explains that they try to avoid handicaps this large, but it was the best they could do with pairing.

But I’m intrigued. This should be a challenge. I’m not great at handicap games, and with 7 stones even a beginner will have a good chance.

Violet sits down across from me. I say hi as she places her handicap stones. She returns my greeting, but reluctantly – she seems a bit shy, or maybe she’s just distracted.

I scatter my opening moves around the board, approaching the corners. She repeatedly blocks by attaching high (I typically approach a 4-4 corner play via the low approach). This leaves her open to a 3-3 invasion, which I am able to exploit on all four corners. I am also able to capture a few sizable groups early on.

So, this may not be as hard as I was afraid it would be. But there’s another problem – as we play, she is building a very solid wall around my territory, claiming the entire center of the board. Normally this is not a sound strategy – there isn’t as much territory in the center as there appears to be, and it is harder to hold. Building that wall takes a lot of moves, and lets me firmly establish my own territory. But I’m backed against the edge pretty effectively here, and it looks like she may have enough points to win.

I manage to connect my corners, taking three sides. Violet is determined to hold the last side, though, and this is, ironically, my chance. I attack a section of her wall that isn’t fully connected. Then another. And another. Eventually I’ve formed a couple of cracks, and I move to drive a wedge into her territory. I don’t try to capture territory, just consume it. This is scorched earth – I just want to make sure nothing will ever grow here again.

I succeed, and we count the stones. I win by 25 points, which means the territory I succeeded in reducing gave me the win. Salting the earth made all the difference.

Wrapping Up

The projector is now displaying the tournament results. I can see that I did pretty well – my standing based on strength of schedule is listed, and my score is double the person below me. That win in round 3 really helped.

In the lull after the last round, people have started talking pretty loudly, and we’ve achieved the sort of din that only 30+ people in a confined space can make. The organizer has to try a few times to start speaking. They have divided the players into 4 sections based on strength:

I’m excited by this, because sorted like this, I’m at the top of section C. When they actually announce winners, though, they announce a 3-way tie for first; they are *only* using wins and losses to determine who ‘wins’ here.

This seems an odd choice; surely, in a ranked tournament, one unambiguous winner per group is preferable to 2 or 3? Especially given how likely it is that, in a given group of 5-10 players, several players will finish with 3 wins and nobody will finish with 4. This is basically why strength of schedule even exists.

I’m not concerned about it, though. Some pictures are taken, and I hang around with a few other players to help clean the place up. We turn out the lights and head downstairs.

At the front of the building, I say goodbye to the people still standing around and head back to my car. The rain has stopped now, and the late afternoon air is crisp and clean.

¹For anyone who is unfamiliar with Go game clocks, the clock has (in addition to some setup buttons hidden under a panel) 2 buttons for each side – one with your colour and a smaller one with your opponent’s colour. They also have an indicator that tells you how much time you have left and how many moves have been played. You press your colour after you move to indicate your move is done (it stops your game clock and starts theirs). You can press and hold the opponent’s colour to have your display show how much time their clock has left. In this tournament, we had 30 minutes main thinking time plus 5 30-second byo-yomi periods. Tournament time in Go is very different than in Chess and many other games.

At the very top of my personal list of improvements to Steam would be “native Linux support”. And I know, I know, I’ve heard all of the conventional wisdom: There isn’t a big enough market to justify porting it. Even if there was, there aren’t enough Linux-native games to make the service very useful. Everybody knows Windows is the OS for gaming.

But sitting here staring down that conventional wisdom is Desura. I’ve known that Desura existed for a while – the Frozenbyte Bundle and the Humble Bundle 3 both had options to acquire ‘Desura keys’, so it was obviously a Steam competitor. Until recently, though, I had just dismissed the product – obviously, I thought, any Steam competitor is going to lag far behind in available games and basic feature set, given Steam’s popularity. Faulty logic, but there it is.

So when a friend told me that Desura works in Linux, I was pretty stunned. I had gotten used to not being the ‘target audience’ for game companies. And now, a few hours later, I’ve got Desura installed, my humble bundle keys redeemed, and I’ve purchased Amnesia: The Dark Descent (which was on sale at the time, and I’ve been meaning to buy for some time anyway).

Desura’s (native Linux!) install is smooth and painless, and its (native Linux!) interface is pretty nice. It has some rough edges, to be fair: most of what it does is load websites that are skinned to feel like part of the interface (much like Steam does), and some of those pages are still obviously works in progress. On the other hand, everything works quickly and smoothly. The main options menu is accessed by clicking the Desura logo, which doesn’t look obviously like a button. So that’s a design flaw, but it didn’t take too long to work out. Redeeming gift keys is more streamlined than in Steam (once you find where to do it!).

Now, Desura certainly isn’t perfect, and it lacks very useful features that Steam has had for some time. One problem I noticed is that it lacks Steam’s resume-after-closing feature; I started to install Amnesia, absent-mindedly closed the client later, and it didn’t auto-resume after I opened Desura again. Desura doesn’t track how much time you’ve sunk into a given game. It also doesn’t have any way to access your save games from multiple locations (a la Steam’s cloud sync), and while their developer info mentions achievements, I haven’t seen any games implement Desura-specific achievements, nor would I even know where to look to find them.

Another feature that both Steam and Desura need are tags, or some sort of organizational system for your games. Right now all Desura has are ‘all games’ and ‘favorite games’. Steam has a categories system, but it doesn’t always save that information across accounts, and you can’t tag games with multiple categories. A proper tagging-based sorting system would be great.

So, Desura has a spartan interface, but it’s also still very young. And more importantly, it runs flawlessly in Linux, which makes it very appealing to me. If you game in Linux at all, check out Desura. It’s already a great service, and it looks like it’s only going to get better.

Our most recent D&D session was pretty short – a small amount of cave exploration, and a single encounter. During that encounter, however, a few things happened that highlighted two fundamentally different approaches to roleplaying games. The scenario in question was this: the party’s Wizard wanted to use Mage Hand to disarm an enemy spellcaster. I had several objections to this idea:

1. The enemy spellcaster isn’t likely to give his wand up without a fight. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we want to make rules for this attempt, it seems reasonable to me that a Mage Hand would have a Str 2, and would have to make an opposed grab roll, with at least a -5 penalty for the act of snatching an object out of the opponent’s grasp.
2. It sets a nasty precedent. If we allow such a simple and repeatable disarm, the game ceases to be challenging. Following this to its logical conclusion, well – the characters’ actions don’t happen in a vacuum. Word of this tactic would get around (indeed, if such a tactic worked, it would likely already be in widespread use). People would start creating defenses against it – locking gloves, magical barriers, whatever. It would necessitate an arms race between the setting and the character that would potentially alter the landscape of my setting in a way that’s not very appealing to me. I’m all for player characters leaving their mark on the world, but I don’t much care for this reactive manner. This would also make enemies with natural weapons fundamentally more useful, which would reduce the amount of variety in encounters. Which, I suspect, isn’t something anyone wants.
3. There simply are no printed rules for disarming an opponent. More importantly, I believe this was an intentional design decision on the part of Wizards of the Coast. A disarmed opponent is effectively defeated; so disarming an opponent is something that you should only be capable of doing when an enemy is reduced to 0 hit points (as anything that is tantamount to defeat should only be possible when the enemy is actually beaten, i.e. deprived of hit points).

Now, I brought up the first objection during play, and the player countered with ‘well, the enemy spellcaster would be surprised by the Mage Hand suddenly appearing’. By that logic, it seemed to me that arrows from a concealed target should always hit their targets, and enemies should likewise be able to surprise and completely defeat the PCs with a good stealth check. That doesn’t sound like a good logic to use when running a combat to me. In a combat situation, everyone involved is, to borrow a quote from Alexandra Erin, “exceptional combatants trying very hard not to get killed”. I didn’t raise the second objection directly, nor did I think of the third until I’d had some time to think about it.

And it’s the third point that I really want to focus on, because it highlights, as I said above, a fundamental divide in how one approaches gaming. On the one hand, you have an approach that focuses on simulating a realistic world (albeit with high fantasy-style magic and other trappings of the genre) in as much detail as possible. This is called (or, at least, I am calling it) simulationist roleplaying.

Simulationist gaming systems tend to be heavy on rules. A game with rules that govern everything a player can possibly do is accurately described as simulationist. This is the style of gaming that leads to damage location, rules to determine exactly where missed arrows end up (and whether they break), and a very precise set of rules governing how magic works in the setting (and categorizing it, explaining how different types of magic do or don’t work together, etc). Simulationist games give you rules for how good your character is at any skill common to the game world, from fighting to cooking, or, gods help us, crafting. If you haven’t spotted it yet, I’m culling all of my examples from D&D 3e, because it is a heavily simulationist game. Earlier versions of D&D were also heavily simulationist.

Simulationist games tend to encourage attempts to find creative loopholes. Because there is a rule for nearly everything, and everything is spelled out in as much detail as possible, it naturally supports the sort of thinking that leads to “well, the spell doesn’t say it can’t do this…”. This, to me, is one of the biggest downsides of simulationist gaming, because it turns the game into a meta-game. Instead of playing a Wizard wandering through the world, destroying your enemies and impressing your friends with your magic, you’re playing a game where you carefully read the spell description to see if you can twist the words to use the spell in a new, advantageous way.

The other style of roleplaying, which I will refer to as narrative roleplaying, involves a greater focus on the narrative of the game, and on the broad themes of the world, without getting bogged down in detailed rules that ensure the game is carefully confined by a rule. In a narrative game, there is not likely to be a table to roll on to determine the quality of the bread baked by a local baker. Narrative-focused game systems tend to be as rules-light as possible, defining the areas that require arbitration (such as combat) and getting out of the way otherwise. Narrative systems also have a tendency to encourage reinterpreting the rules in ways that don’t effect their mechanical structure. D&D 4e and the entire White Wolf canon are good examples of games with a narrative focus.

The interesting thing about games with a narrative focus, or at least D&D in particular, is that there is a disconnect between the rules and the diegetic game world that doesn’t make sense from a simulationist perspective. For example, look at Second Wind. Second Wind operates diegetically on the principle that you take a moment to center yourself, to quickly bandage a wound, or to just take a ‘breather’, and thereby gain the stamina to keep fighting. Notice first that any of those things could apply narratively – you might do one or all of them, or something else that is analogous, as the situation warrants. But more importantly, you can only do this once per battle. Why? What makes bandaging a wound the first time extend your ability to keep fighting, but bandaging a wound again ineffective? It’s the same action; shouldn’t it have the same consequences?

The reason is that the rules account for things outside your character’s control. A battle is chaotic, and you don’t get many opportunities to step back and take stock of the situation and get your feet back  under you. Such a chance comes rarely – let’s say only once in a brief struggle of 10 rounds or so. Using Second Wind doesn’t simply represent an action that your character takes – it also represents your character taking advantage of things that are beyond her control, such as an ebb in the rhythm of the fight, to take a quick break and recover some stamina. As the player, the rules are giving you a limited ability to control things that are beyond your character’s control, for the sake of the narrative.

Encounter and daily powers work the same way. The ranger power Split the Tree is a daily power. The simulationist model would suggest that this doesn’t make sense unless the ranger has some sort of mystical ability that they can only tap into once per day that gives them the power to fire two arrows at once. The narrative approach gives us a way out, though: the ranger could fire two arrows any time she likes, but she doesn’t get an opening, or time to line up the shot, every round. That sort of opportunity only comes once in a while – hence, a daily power. The player gets the ability to decide when that opening and free time show up, but it can only happen a maximum of once per day. This is completely an arbitrary restriction imposed by the rules; for the sake of game balance, you can only do these things a limited number of times within the framework of the narrative. It is a concession to drama over realism.

This is especially noticeable in the rules on magic item daily powers. No matter how many magic items you’re carrying around, you can only use 1 magic item daily power per day (at the heroic tier). This isn’t because the magic items share a pool of magic; rather, it is because the narrative and the game balance demand that these things be used sparingly. A warrior who relies on his magic items and shows no sign of actual combat prowess is, well… Tony Stark. And Tony Stark is a tool.

Here’s another way to explain the fundamental difference between the two approaches: in a Simulationist game, the rules encapsulate the character. In a Narrative game, the rules encapsulate the narrative. And having said all of that, I’m still not certain I’ve made my point, which is that I prefer games like D&D 4e precisely because they encourage dramatic narrative thinking instead of simulationist thinking. The narrative approach gives you two important freedoms. First, you can make a balanced game without having to jump through contortionist hoops to explain why wizards and rogues have roughly the same level of power. Second, and more interestingly, they give the players a lot more room for creative expression – you can slap any narrative description or explanation on top of an existing rule, and as long as it doesn’t change the mechanics, you have nothing to worry about.

If you want to learn more about my homebrew setting of Yord, or follow the antics of the PCs, check out my campaign at Epic Words.

“Can video games be art?” is one of those questions that has been discussed to death. Of course, the problem domain of defining art is a notoriously snare-laden landscape. But by almost any definition, it is clear from nearly the beginning of the game Braid that it is a conscious attempt to argue the case that video games can be art. At the very least, it is aesthetically compelling, with strongly cohesive sprites, backgrounds, music, and animations. But I would argue that it is more than just aesthetically interesting, and that it passes muster as a piece of art by almost any definition.

But more than that, the art direction reflects the themes and mood of the story, to say nothing of the symbolism encoded in the art. And the story emerges from and is intertwined with the gameplay. As Phil of The Nintendo Project recently observed:

[In Braid,] the story extends from the gameplay. It’s a story about the passage of time, memory, and regret, but all of the aspects of the story are simply thematic meditations on things about the gameplay. When the game introduces time-locked objects, the story introduces the idea of mistakes that cannot be undone. When it introduces the ability to have a shadow Tim carry out one set of actions while Tim carries out another, it introduces the idea of regret for lives unlived.

This is something that no other game in my memory has ever done. Coupling the gameplay not just to the content of the story (such as it is), but with the emotional and psychological themes of the game. Now, every game, however devoid of life, contains emotional and psychological themes. Everything we interact with does, because our minds are founded, by definition, in psychology. We approach the world by interpreting it, even if we do it on an unconscious level. Even pong can be discussed in terms of boundaries, liminal spaces, conflict, and the repetition of actions for an arbitrary and meaningless rewards.

However, games like Braid are different. They are written purposefully to draw out certain themes. They are intended to have emotive content rather than simply being circumscribed by our emotional reactions to them. Another insight of Phil’s, and the topic I really want to talk about with Braid, is this:

The thing about Braid that I think a lot of people miss, despite it probably being the most important thing about the game, is that it is one of an increasing number of games to operate in a lyrical mode as opposed to an epic mode. Implicit in this, of course, is the idea that the nearest textual medium to video games is poetry. And so Braid, instead of telling a narrative story about rescuing a princess, instead offers an extended poem in which video game mechanics, growing up, the apocalypse, and love are all intertwined into a… well… braid.

So, let’s start with something pretty basic. Phil is discussing here a dichotomy between poetry and narrative. Now, obviously he doesn’t mean poetry as an art form generally – after all, narrative poems certainly exist. Rather, what we’re talking about is a difference between two modes of writing – that is, two different things you can do with the written word. You can tell a straightforward story in which the narrative flows directly – in this mode, regardless of whether your story is allegorical or contains deeper meanings and metaphors, there is a surface level of actions that are related in some basic order. This mode, which I will call the ‘narrative mode’ for simplicity, is how most stories are told.

Another mode, though, and one that is associated in many people’s minds with poetry in general, is what Phil calls a ‘lyrical mode’. Narrative story is thrown out in favor of suggestive imagery and implicit connections. It is harder to tell a story in this mode, because we think of stories as following a single cause-and-effect sequence that we call its narrative. However, stories can be told like this, and Braid does so.

The result is a story that, while clearly a story, doesn’t have a single narrative in it. There are certainly many interpretations of Braid, but the only one I’ve seen that does them justice is the one quoted above. The story is not ‘a metaphor for the development of the nuclear bomb’, as one interpreter suggests. The development of the nuclear bomb is certainly a clear theme, but it is not the one correct interpretation of the story. Rather, there are many interpretations of the story that are all true, simultaneously. And the writer probably didn’t intend for all of them to be there – the interesting thing about writing in the lyrical mode is that you can make connections, while writing, that you weren’t consciously aware of, and that others can make connections from the symbols you use that you didn’t intend. It is a way of using language (and art, and music) that would seem messy to anyone who insists that a sentence only have one correct meaning, but the result is a beautiful and moving piece of art about regret, love, and the inevitability of loss.

Final Score: Yes

Trigger Warning: descriptions of rape and violence ahead. Please do not read if these things may be harmful to you.

First, the backstory – Duke Nukem Forever was released after a decade of anticipation and shifting release dates, with the game being dropped and picked up by development houses and publishers along the way. And now that it is out? Almost every review of Duke Nukem Forever has been negative. It has an abysmal metacritic score (although higher than it deserves, it seems to me). Many of the reviews have pointed out, in addition to poor graphics and boring gameplay, the blatant misogyny that fills the game in place of interesting content. Even Destructoid, which doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to sexism, lambasted the game for its immaturity and offensiveness.

The game doesn’t just support rape culture incidentally by propagating misogynistic tropes, though; it absolutely revels in it. According to the Destructoid review:

…at times, the game’s attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific. One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

I was speechless after reading this. This is simply heinous. It completely falls flat as humor. Even for people who are regularly amused by harmful, offensive humor, I suspect this just isn’t funny. It’s sad and disgusting that the writers of this game felt the need to use violent sexual assault as a setup for an excruciatingly bad joke.

In light of the bad reviews, The Redner Group, the PR agency responsible for sending out review copies got angry and lashed out on twitter, saying:

too many went too far with their reviews… we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom

So, if someone writes a massively harmful misogynist game that includes the premise ‘rape is funny’, and you have the audacity to point that out, you deserve to be punished by losing access to review any game from that publisher. I mean… look. While Feminists often talk about the silencing tactics that people use to keep rape culture intact, we don’t usually get such a blatant example. You’re blatantly saying “if you speak out about this, we will blacklist you”. It is a direct threat to damage the career of anyone who calls you out for your misogyny. If nothing else, Redner Group, thanks for such an illustrative example.

The Redner Group isn’t the only group that has issues with the negative reviews. We have some fine apologetics going on over here on Kotaku. One user in particular, with the outstanding handle of 0LunarEclipse0, had this to say:

Just because you can’t handle shock humor does not make it not funny. Everything can be funny. I’ve laughed at some of the most racist and disgusting jokes. Maybe that makes me a horrible person… Just because something pushes you to far doesn’t mean it pushes everyone to far… Nothing should ever be off limits. If we sacrifice freedom we sacrafice [sic] life.

The very fact that this offends you is more truth that it should be defended. Because you want it silenced. Censored. Well freedom means free. Regardless of how much something offends you, we can say and do what we want. Because your feelings don’t matter.

I don’t support rape and this joke goes a little to far even for me. But I beleive [sic] in freedom. So nothing ever should be off limits.

Okay, 0 (can I call you 0?). There’s a lot wrong with this – it’s basically a giant mess of privilege denial – so let’s take it a piece at a time. Frankly, I don’t care whether you’re offended. Offense is not the point. When I say that Duke Nukem Forever should not exist, I don’t say that because I think it is offensive. I say it because it will cause material harm. It reinforces – undeniably and strongly – the cultural narrative that rape is acceptable. Because when something is made into a joke, it is normalized. It is established as a set part of our culture. This will inevitably make it seem more reasonable, or justifiable, because it is normal. That is what rape culture does – it makes rape seem normal, inevitable, and by extension, acceptable.

So let’s lay out what we’re really talking about here. Duke Nukem Forever normalizes rape. It contributes to and propagates rape culture. To defend this game is to defend the act of rape. So no, I don’t care who is offended by Duke Nukem Forever. I care about who it is going to hurt.

On to the next premise: “freedom means free”. First, I don’t know what Randian faux-Utopia you live in, but in the reality I’m accustomed to, society puts certain limits on freedom. For instance, you are not free to kill another person. But i digress – let’s talk about what’s really on your mind. You’ve erected a strawman argument here that suggests the game’s detractors are trying to say the game should be pulled from the shelves, or banned, or something similar. I don’t know if reviews have been suggesting that – I can’t find any that have. I, at least, am not going to suggest that.

Certainly, the case could be made that this game should not be allowed to see release. My discussion of its harmful nature above edges in that direction. But I would rather err on the side of letting something harmful be created than that of censoring something worthwhile. So, I’m going to say this: Certainly, 2K games is free to develop and publish a game with this content. But I stand by my assertion in this post’s title, as well: the game should not exist. The world is not made a better place, in any way, by its existence. In fact, as I have suggested above, I hold that the world has been actively made a worse place by this game existing. It should not exist in the sense that decent human beings should know better than to create something this full of hate. But none of that is to suggest that the game shouldn’t be allowed to be released, or should be banned or censored, which is what the strawman argument says (although I would suggest that, if we’re going to have a rating system at all, the ESRB’s rating of M is dismissive of the seriousness of rape; this game should absolutely be AO). Rather, I’m suggesting that it is a negative mark for our entire society that we produce people capable of producing this game.

Moreover, you are applying your freedom conspicuously in only one direction. If the developers should have the freedom to make this game, why shouldn’t reviewers have the freedom to express their opinions about the game? It seems more a little hypocritical to complain about people exercising the freedom you’re so insistent on. So which is it? Do we ‘believe in freedom’, or not? Or does that freedom only apply when it lets you laugh at women being raped to death, and not when people suggest that maybe that’s a little bit fucked up?

One last thing I’d like to talk about is this claim:

I don’t support rape

By defending this game under the guise of ‘humor’, you do support rape. You may claim to have taken some abstract stand against rape, but you are contradicting that claim with your words. The same goes for anyone who would argue that this game has any redeeming value. The game contains content that is tantamount to hate speech against women. You are free to purchase and play Duke Nukem Forever – as you say, freedom is an important thing! However, if you do choose to support this game, you are supporting rape culture. So just, you know, keep that in mind.

When D&D 4e was launched, I was highly skeptical. I joined the vocal legion of gamers who saw it as a move towards MMO-like game mechanics and immersion-breaking shallow gameplay, and as little more than a money grab by Wizards of the Coast. However, after reading several posts by Alexandra Erin on the subject, I decided to give it a try. Her insight into the game’s design decisions convinced me that there might be something worth trying.

As I began playing around with the rules, creating sample PCs, NPCs, encounters and sketching the rough framework for several stories, I began to see that 4e had a lot of promise. I spent a good deal of money buying source books, and started looking to get a game together. I finally got a game going, albeit with a very small number of players (only two of them!). I set this game, as I do all of my D&D games (dating back to 2nd edition), in my homebrew setting of Yord.

So, we finally got together and played what I am going to affectionately refer to as our first two gaming sessions. In practice, this was actually four shorter sessions, but I digress. Here are some impressions of 4e, and things that I learned from these first sessions.

I don’t really know how to structure skill challenges. My character-driven approach to running games means that building skill challenges in advance is difficult, at least early on before the story has begun to take shape. Building them on the fly is difficult, too, and they tend to end up feeling contrived and kludgy, not to mention a bit of a slog to get through. Hopefully designing these well will become easier as I gain experience with the system.

Combat encounters, by contrast, are a joy to design and to run. It is easy to scale back encounters to account for fewer PCs, and encounter design in general is faster and less haphazard than in previous editions. It gives me more time to focus on making interesting tactical scenarios, place difficult terrain and other interesting aspects of the encounter.

I also love the game’s focus on making traps and hazards into part of an encounter. Lone traps always seemed tedious more often than they are interesting, and this makes it easy to put in the requisite traps to make a dungeon feel like a dungeon without leading to the depressing “disarm the next pit” slog. Interesting traps that deserve time to allow the PCs to pore over and tinker with them can still be encounters of their own, but most traps can now be seamlessly incorporated into combat, where they actually make things more interesting.

Another thing I love about 4e, and this is something that D&D has needed for a long time, is the concept of Power Types and Combat Roles. The roles neatly encapsulate what the ‘core four’ classes have always done – fighters look big and dangerous so that the fight will concentrate on them, rogues slip in to deal tons of damage to single targets, clerics provide buffs and healing, keeping the party alive and together, and wizards mop up the smaller targets so that everyone else can focus on the bigger threats. Someone at Wizards finally realized that these four roles, while important and useful, were somewhat arbitrarily tied to their class concepts. In 4e, the ‘Power Type’ has been divorced from the Role, so that there are classes that encapsulate the cleric’s healing and buffing abilities, but are rooted in martial or arcane themes.

This makes it a lot easier to create a character concept first, and then implement it according to the game mechanics. The general effect is that 4e makes it very easy to provide your own flavor without affecting the game balance – in general, the de facto rule is that ‘anything that doesn’t affect the game mechanics is fair game, unless your DM disapproves’. This encourages much more creativity and narrative flair than previous editions.

And yet, for all of the flexibility and useful decoupling of combat roles vs class theme, the system excels at ensuring that a given character is basically functional, and has a cohesive set of powers. This is something I noticed while running battles; they did a pretty good job of making sure everyone can be useful in combat. No more ‘I was a wizard but now I am tired’ effects, to steal a quote. This is an advantage over more piecemeal systems like GURPS, Savage Worlds, or D&D 3e – it’s pretty hard to build a useless character.

So, those are my general impressions of 4e after a couple sessions of play. Now let’s look at some anecdotes from my session.

During character creation, both of my players settled on Arcane classes – a Wizard and a Warlock. I rounded out the party with a DM-controlled companion character; a gnomish Arcane Leader. He is basically a Bard, but I chose his powers to play to the Gnome Illusionist trope. This party seems to work pretty well; I used a kobold raid on the town to test-drive the combat system, and things went well. I then used the companion character to drive a simple story – he offered looting rights in exchange for helping him recover a statue from some nearby goblins.

An aside on my DMing style here: I play a heavily character-driven style. Where some DMs would railroad the party for the sake of the story, I will sacrifice the story for the sake of the party’s actions. If they had chosen to turn Mim down, he would have gone his way while they continued on theirs. This DMing style has its disadvantages (notably, it requires a lot of improvising!), but it has some strong advantages as well. It creates the feeling from the outset that the characters’ actions actually have an impact on the story. I build the story around those actions, largely in terms of causal consequences. I do begin to practice a subtle railroading as the story develops – it often becomes easy and logical to put the story in front of the characters, and then simply observe how they deal with it. At any rate, most people seem to like this style of game, based on the feedback I’ve gotten in the past.

So, our next combat encounter occurred at the entrance to the goblins’ den. A few goblins were guarding the entrance; the party fought them off, but at least one escaped into the complex. Reasoning there was probably at least one other entrance, and that the bulk of the goblins would be through the main entrance, the party Wizard decided to blast the cave ceiling with magic missiles until it collapsed. This was my first serious blunder as a DM in 4e, I think – I said no to this idea. In retrospect, it was narratively interesting, tactically interesting, and there wasn’t a terribly good reason to say no. Given the imminence of goblin reinforcements, it was actually a great time for a skill challenge – Arcana and Dungeoneering checks to bring the cave down. After realizing this, I (much later) retconned the encounter and allowed that the cave had been partially collapsed.

These first couple of sessions were promising, and 4e looks like a system that is well-designed. It leaves a lot of room for creativity without being so free-form as to lose its sense of cohesion.

If you want to learn more about my homebrew setting of Yord, or follow the antics of the PCs, check out my campaign at Epic Words.

Curious, my friend and I got a ride over to Media Play. There, I found a pretty large group of people playing Magic. I also saw an interesting sight: some people with books, funny shaped dice, and little painted figures arranged on a square grid. I watched for a few minutes, and quickly got the gist of what they were doing. I asked if I could join. The response? “Sure, we need a cleric.”

Thus began a hobby that has spanned half my life and cost a great deal of money. I have played a number of systems: World of Darkness, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Rifts, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (the older edition that used d6s), homebrew systems created by various friends. But I always come back to D&D. It was my first system, and it remains my favorite through three editions of the game. In a lot of ways, it has grown with me.

In the last few years, though, I haven’t had many chances to play D&D. I was skeptical of 4e at first, and then spent a lot of money buying 4e books after Alexandra Erin convinced me of its merits in her repeated, impassioned blog posts about it (all of those links are excellent reading, even if you already know you like 4e). I sat on these purchases for months, planning games, even getting some people to make characters. But no game formed; the other players either didn’t have free time, or I didn’t have free time, or we were too far away.

The Search for a Gaming Table

Eventually I found a little free time to bring a game together, and since I couldn’t solve the problem of my friends’ lack of free time, I started looking to solve the problem of people who had free time, but were too far away. So I started looking for a solution to playing D&D over the Internet. Namely, what I needed was something known as a virtual tabletop. I started out with simple requirements: free is good, open source is even better. Since there was no good overview or comparison of the existing virtual tabletop options, I decided to make one. I’ll describe, briefly, why I didn’t pick each one (until I get to the one I *did* pick, of course).

OpenRPG – frustratingly deprecated

Years ago (about 10 of them), I tried using WebRPG as a virtual tabletop. I remember it having a somewhat cumbersome and over-engineered interface, and being frustrated with it on many levels. Still, it was the first thing in my memory, so it’s the first thing I looked up. Turns out it went open source a while back, and is now called OpenRPG.

Unfortunately, this was a non-starter. OpenRPG is written in Python (yay!), but doesn’t work with Python 2.7, which is the de facto standard in Fedora. I didn’t want to maintain a separate Python install for just one program (this is possible, but would be a pretty big hassle to set up), so OpenRPG was a bust.

Screen Monkey – expensive and cumbersome

The next program I discovered was Screen Monkey. Once again, Alexandra Erin was instrumental in this – she mentioned using it for her online games. Screen Monkey has one big advantage – for the players, it is browser based, so only the DM needs to install any client software. Unfortunately, that software only runs in Windows. So, I found an old install disk for Windows XP, and installed it as a virtual machine using KVM. Then I installed Screen Monkey Lite.

More bad news, though. Screen Monkey Lite turns out to be rather light on useful features. The biggest problem is that you can’t save your work – you have to buy the $35 version of the program to save and restore a session. The tools for hiding what the players can see was also fairly awkward. Awkward, in fact, is the word I would use to describe the program’s feeling as a whole. NBOS are terribly proud of their software ($35 proud) only to be outdone by multiple free and open source competitors. Sounds like some other software companies I know.

Gametable – RIP

Gametable looked promising, but doesn’t seem to be actively developed (there was a sourceforge project available a while back, and remnants of it are here, but it seems to be dead now), and it didn’t work very well for me.

Fantasy Grounds – pretty, but overpriced

Next up is Fantasy Grounds. I didn’t even try the demo once I saw the price tag – $40 for the DM-capable client, and $24 each for the players’ clients. One of my hard requirements is that my players not have to spend any money on the solution, so this one was right out. For a more affluent group, though, it might be a great solution. I will concede that it is gorgeous, and looks very well polished. Certainly a better contender for your money than Screen Monkey. And it has acknowledged, if unofficial, plugins for various game systems, including D&D 4e.

MapTool – the right balance

Eventually, I found MapTool, one of the applications created by the RPTools team. MapTool originally didn’t impress me – it seemed cumbersome and unwieldy. After working with it for a while, though, I found that most of its design decisions make sense, and that it is very powerful. Like most powerful toolkits, it is subsequently pretty complicated, and using it effectively took some practice. However, once I got the hang of it, it’s unbeatable. It’s more stable than any of the other open source offerings, and it runs well out of the box. It lets you use fog of war, individual player views (based on available light sources), and it lets you make maps in advance but have them hidden from the players until you are ready to show them.

Also invaluable was Dorpond’s 4e framework. This is a set of configuration settings and macros that work together to make MapTool work well with the D&D 4e rules. I have modified his macros a bit to fit my particular play style (notably, I prefer to let players roll their own initiatives), and am continuing to do so as I playtest them. You can find my latest version of the framework here.

Also, three caveat with maptool:
1. The network functionality doesn’t work with OpenJDK. Linux users will want to install the Java JRE instead. In Fedora, I just installed the jre RPM from Sun’s website, then edited MapTool’s startup script and added ‘export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default’ and ‘export PATH=\$JAVA_HOME/bin:\$PATH’ near the top of the file.
2. When starting a server, if you do not select ‘Use Individual Views’, the GM will not see an accurate version of the player’s view.
3. When you have tokens in the initiative list, players can only move their token on their own turn. Trying to move when they don’t have initiative will send them into an annoying endless loop of NullPointerExceptions. I’m hoping this gets fixed soon by the MapTools team, because it’s an obnoxious bug. Luckily, MapTools is Open Source – I may take a crack at finding that bug myself.

D&D Virtual Table – still cooking

Wizards of the Coast has recently announced a beta version of their own virtual tabletop – called, simply enough, D&D Virtual Table. It is only available to select D&D Insider subscribers. And, since D&D Insider is not worth the price for me personally (a topic worthy of an entire post unto itself), I have no idea whether it is any good. It would also certainly require every player to have their own D&D Insider subscription, so it breaks my stated rule. Still, it might be something to keep an eye on.

Adding Voice

So, now that we had a game table, we needed a way to talk to each other. Luckily, there is a readily available, cross-platform solution to this: TeamSpeak. Now, TeamSpeak isn’t open source, and it is not free if you want to host multiple teamspeak servers on one machine (or have more than 32 clients connected). But it’s great for a D&D game, which would never need those resources. It’s dead simple to set up the server in Linux, and the permissions management is very intelligent (and again, dead simple).

Let’s look at the options I didn’t choose for voice chat: Skype relies on a central server, and has a history of iffy privacy practices. Ventrilo offers a Linux server, but no Linux client. And the voice chat available in various Instant Messaging programs is either unreliable, or doesn’t work in Linux either. So, TeamSpeak it is, and it works great.

Passing Notes

The last thing I needed was a way to present textual information to the players. I do a lot of world-building and writing background material, and I want to make sure that is available to the players (at least, the publicly revealable parts). I also want to be able to give them things like notes that they might acquire, and possibly conduct some roleplaying between sessions if a session ends during downtime.

There are plenty of ways to simply share files, and these would be adequate. Dropbox could be used, especially for image files. Google Docs seemed like a pretty good way to share documents with players. After considering it for a while, I discovered a site called Epic Words. Epic Words gives you a journal system, so players can post in-character summaries of game sessions; this also works well as a means to deliver chunks of story-based text such as notes, riddles, etc. in a way that the players can easily access and remember.

Epic Words also has wiki-like functionality, and lets you define “references”, including NPCs and places, that will be linked automatically when mentioned in a blog post. This is an especially useful feature, because it lets me, as the DM, add content to the players’ writings without actually changing their creative work. It also gives you a private forum, which is perfect for the kind of between-session downtime roleplaying I have in mind.

Epic Words’ biggest problem is that it only allows you to run a single campaign without either upgrading, ‘retiring’ the existing campaign, or deleting it. And even with the upgrade, there doesn’t appear to be a way to share references / wiki content between campaigns (I don’t know this for sure, because I can’t really test that, but it appears to be the case). If I were running multiple campaigns, there is a slew of generic world history and other setting information I would like to share between campaigns. If you could make wiki pages independent of campaigns and then ‘link’ them in, that would be ideal. As it is, I happen to only be running one campaign at the moment, so I will have to cross that bridge if and when I come to it.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I ended up using three tools to interact with my players: MapTool, TeamSpeak, and Epic Words. I like this solution because it is very Unix-philosophy friendly – each tool serves one purpose. MapTool acts as our tabletop, TeamSpeak is how we communicate, and Epic Words gives us a handy place for wrap-up/reference/between-session play. The overall experience is pretty excellent; this is a good way to play D&D. It is better than I was hoping for, and even surpasses actual face-to-face play in some ways (I would love to find a way to use MapTool with a projector for face-to-face play).

This post contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Please do not read if you have not played these games and intend to.

Several years ago, a game called Portal came bundled with Valve’s Orange Box. It was, along with Team Fortress 2, bundled with Half Life 2: Episode 2 as a sort of apology for how long Episode 2 took to release (which makes you wonder exactly what is going to come bundled with Episode 3, a title that is quickly gaining Duke Nukem Forever-like mythic status as a delayed release).

At the time, Portal seemed to be all anyone could talk about, to the point that it eclipsed the main title of the Orange Box (HL2: Episode 2). And everyone told me that I just had to play it. “It’s a puzzle game, and it’s hilarious!” Eventually I scraped together enough money to spend $50 for a 6-hour game (to this day, I haven’t actually played Half Life 2… maybe some day. I did, at least, get some enjoyment out of TF2 after I’d had the Orange Box for over a year). I did not regret a single penny of that purchase. Portal remains, to this day, one of the absolute best games I have ever played. The pacing, the atmosphere (provided almost entirely by the sense of isolation and the slow realization that GLaDOS isn’t just a quirky and humorous gimmick there for comic relief, but rather actually wants to kill you), the gameplay itself – Portal gets every single thing it does right. And it was practically a throwaway game – a little side project of Valve’s that clearly wasn’t given anything like the funding that went into, say, the Half Life 2 series.

Of course, praising Portal is a lot like saying “hey, Democracy is pretty good!” in the US¹. It would take some effort to find someone who disagrees with me on the point. So let’s move on to something a bit more controversial (at least among the people I know who have played both Portal and Portal 2):

Portal 2 is not as good as Portal.

Let’s start with the characters. The voice acting in Portal 2 is superb. You couldn’t ask for better. However, the inclusion of more characters lessens the psychological impact of the game. In this game we have the addition of the Emergency Testing AI, Wheatley, Cave Johnson, Caroline, several new turrent personalities. All of this makes this game feel positively vibrant with personalities; I rarely felt the sense of loneliness and isolation that crept in during the original game. The original Portal only had 5 characters, and 3 of them were silent (with one of them being entirely absent): GLaDOS, Chell, the turrets, the Companion Cube, and Rattman. Portal 2 more than doubles the number of characters. Sure, some of them are present only in pre-recorded messages (Emergency Testing AI, Cave, and Caroline), but they still feel more present than Rattman ever did, and they decrease the game’s sense of isolation where he increases it.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this inherently. Not every game is or should be about creating a sense of isolation, and if they had tried to just do more of the same, the result would probably have been far worse. However, atmosphere in general is important for any game, and the emotional context and atmosphere created in the original Portal is powerful, and it drives the game forward. Portal 2, by contrast, relies on the progression of the narrative to drive the game forward.

This is the point where anyone who knows me just did a double-take. Did I just criticize a game for being driven by its story? It’s true, I love a good story, and I’ve been vocal in my opinion that games need good stories to thrive. My criticism comes from a couple directions. One of them is has already been well-covered by Shamus Young the tendency for games to get bogged down in a gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene cycle. Portal allowed you to move at your own pace, and the narrative was woven into and around the game as  you progressed. Portal 2 still retains some of this (more than many games, certainly), but has significantly long sequences in which, while you still retain nominal freedom to move about, there is no gameplay accessible to you until you sit through some amount of dialogue or cutscene (the opening of the game is a good example, as is Wheatley’s “about to jump off the management rail” monologue). In the original Portal, the only ‘cutscene’ I can recall – that is, a moment where your ability to progress the game is interrupted – is the opening, where you wait to get out of the initial chamber. And that can be forgiven somewhat, as it serves as a chance to get used to the controls more than anything else.

Another reason I criticize Portal 2′s approach is that I’ve come to realize that obvious and overt narratives – that is, traditional narratives – are difficult to do well in video games. Games that focus on such narratives are usually not playing to the strengths of the medium. Video games thrive in immersion, in creating a sense of atmosphere. The more focus a game puts on that aspect, the more compelling I tend to find it. Video Games can be a fantastic mode of storytelling, and they can be really fun to play, but a compelling atmosphere gives both of these things a critical boost that makes video games capable of standing out from both traditional stories and traditional games. The best two games of the last decade – Portal and Braid – were light on actual story, leaving you to fill in gaps and speculate much of the time. The subsequent atmosphere that develops, and is sustained through several hours of gameplay, leads your mind into creating a memorable, branching, and somewhat fuzzily defined narrative experience. This forces the player to engage with the game in a way that books and films really can’t.

Of course, games can have both atmosphere and a more direct narrative – both of my examples above have a progressing narrative, and Braid even gives you medium-sized chunks of text that you must stop and read. The problem is that, without the first, the second will fall flat – you just end up with a story you could have told more effectively in a different medium. Video Games give us a unique opportunity to create a specific sort of immersion in our storytelling that other mediums are incapable of, and it is a shame to squander it. It doesn’t matter what the atmosphere that the game immerses you in is like, as long as it dips you into it as deeply as it can and keeps you there. That is what makes a gripping gaming experience, to my mind.

(As an aside, a game can even create a compelling atmosphere without telling a story. Games with very little story can use art direction, such as visual cues and music, to make the games much more immersive. Katamari Damashii is a good example – there’s no story worth mentioning, but the game’s consistently quirky and unique art and music make it a compelling experience.)

Portal 2 has moments that are still quite brilliant, though. The Different Turret is a particularly impressive bit of atmosphere-building, and there are a number of scenes, especially in Chapter 6, where the scale and the haunted feeling of the environment bring back that sense of bleak isolation from Portal. But it doesn’t deliver atmosphere as consistently, and that is the key thing that makes it less successful as a game.

Another thing I have to criticize about Portal 2 is the addition of bigotry to the humour. After playing Portal 2, I played back through Portal for comparison; there is no overtly bigoted dialogue in the game, or even any subtle bigotry as far as I could see. In fact, the game consists of two strong female characters in conflict, with nary a man in site. It blows the Bechdel Test out of the water.

On the other hand, Portal 2 resorts to ableism, sizeism, and sexism (by way of appearance/body shaming) for some of its humour. What’s more, there are subtly sexist assumptions underlying the jokes; GLaDOS plays the part of the stereotypical “woman betrayed by another woman”, and is thus written as needing to attack Chell in a way that will make her feel insecure about herself. And, obviously, the best way to make a woman feel insecure is to attack her appearance. “You’re fat, and your clothes look bad.” Because clearly (goes the sexist thought pattern), all women care about is their appearance, and thus such a jab would make any woman feel insecure.

Portal 2 is the multi-million dollar blockbuster sequel to a compelling, cerebral, and very weird independent film, and it shows. The thing is, it is still an absolutely fantastic game, with beautiful and well-designed visuals, great writing and acting (the line ‘Caroline Deleted’ was a pitch-perfect delivery, in particular), fun gameplay all around, and some pretty decent puzzles to solve. And it is the only sequel Portal could have had – it was this or nothing. Because you can’t do a compellingly weird independent sequel; it would diminish the original by attempting to imitate it.

Final Score: Potato

¹Note that I am not actually claiming, here, that Democracy is good. It was just an example²

²Note that I am not actually claiming, here, that Democracy is bad. It was just a clarification.

It seemed strange that a character in the game sounded so much like my wife. Also, my character had just looked at her watch, and it was way after 1. And there wasn’t anyone else in the room.

“Did you hear me?”

The surround sound on this game is great, too. It sounds like that voice is coming from right behind me. I turn my character around, but don’t see anything. Kinda creepy.

Then it dawns on me, and I press Start, and turn around.

This is the effect Heavy Rain has on me. The story in this game is that gripping, compelling. It propels you forward naturally, the pacing keeping you engaged without overwhelming. This game has the highest production quality of any game I can recall playing. I’ve seen the phrase interactive movie thrown around here and there over the years, but Heavy Rain turns that on its head; it is not a movie; it is doing things with storytelling that a movie can’t do, for a number of reasons. It’s not a visual novel either, because it is far more than a series of cinematic sequences with decision points. Rather, we have something entirely new here, and it is an ambitious and compelling idea.

I have been known to opine that a great piece of art is one that plays to the strengths of its medium. A great novel uses the written word to convey something that can only be conveyed with writing. Certain combinations of words have great effect on the reader, in a way that the same scene in a movie might miss entirely. Literature has the advantage of narration; a voice that can drive the story in ways that are unique to the form, and great stories capitalize on this.

A great movie, on the other hand, uses the fact that it is a visual medium to convey powerful emotional content that would feel flat in writing. Lighting, facial expression, and tone of voice can be evocative in a movie like they never could in writing. Plays have their own framework, and they are at their best when they exploit this fact. Ditto music, painting, and other artistic forms.

Heavy Rain is the first game that I have encountered that takes this approach with a video game. It is treating the game as a work of art, and not simply an entertaining way to kill time. Sure, other games have stories and beautifully rendered scenery. They have characters that portray emotion, sometimes. But Heavy Rain uses the canvas of video games to tell a story in a unique way; you couldn’t copy this story to movie or novel form without losing, or at least changing, something important.

Traditional games, even ones with great stories, are hampered by a number of problems. One is the tendency for this pattern to emerge:

1. Plot (cutscene, dialogue tree, etc)
2. Gameplay (random battles, shooting bad guys)
3. Goto 1.

In Heavy Rain, the plot and gameplay are intertwined inextricably, and the gameplay doesn’t devolve into the usual video game tropes of, well, killing Bad Guys. It’s more nuanced than that, and you observe a story unfolding in which your actions have real consequences, both minor and major, and in both the short and long term.

It’s been obvious to me for a long time that video games could potentially be art, evoke a broad range of real human emotion in the player, and deal with deep themes without resorting to ham-fisted tropes or dulling the emotional experience with tons of unrelated gameplay between evocative scenes. Heavy Rain is the first time I’ve seen this potential realized.

I played through the trial run of Eve Online. It worked without much complaint in wine. Let’s look at the things I think are cool about Eve Online, and the problems and realizations that came from the trial.

Okay, the star map. I could spend hours just playing with the gorram star map. Coloring systems by various data, playing with routes… the star map makes me feel like I’m in an Asimov novel. This hits my geek spot so very very hard.

The scale of the game is immense. 4500 star systems. Something to do in every one of them. It’s mind-boggling, and it’s easy to feel lost in the vast cloud of stars. Which is a good thing, for me.

The setting is really cool. The whole concept of capsuleers – transhumanist sociopaths, small gods reigning death on lesser humans – is really cool. The fact that you play as one is the surprising part. And NPCs even make reference to the fact that your ‘kind’ have a reputation for callousness. Very well executed.

In theory, I love the PvP/corporation/territorial battle aspects of Eve. Player-run corporations can control star systems. That’s amazing. In fact, it is the single coolest thing the game has to offer. If VO could find a way to implement sector/system sovereignty, it would be a better game (I believe this is being worked on).

Eve has a HUGE player base. There are human players in pretty much every system I pass through. However, while the player base is huge, I find myself rarely interacting with them. Which is fine, in that it is realistic enough; I have no real reason to talk to these pilots at this time. But it makes me realize that VO’s absence of a huge player base isn’t as much of a deal breaker as I thought.

I like that Eve’s economy is thoroughly player-driven. Vendetta feels contrived; sure, prices fluctuate as you move commodities from one port to another, but a station isn’t relying on players for a shipment of actual, usable goods, like weapons and ships. The economy in Eve is easily the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. The fact that it works is almost unbelievable.

Eve has some graphical and performance issues, and it isn’t really any prettier than Vendetta Online on my hardware. This is annoying, because Eve looks and runs better in Windows. That’s a HUGE point in Vendetta’s favor; Linux compatibility is very important to me.

Combat in Eve can be boring at times. Theoretically it’s a more tactical approach, but PvE comes down to:

1. Click enemy.
2. Click “Lock”
3. Press F1
4. Wait until enemy is dead

You might need to toggle some shield hardeners or armor repair modules, or run away to repair/reload. But that’s about it for the entry-level PvE. Now, granted, PvP is another deal altogether, and I’m sure the combat in PvE gets more nuanced. The presence of tons of options (weapons, shields, add-ons, upgrades, ‘rigs’) is really cool, too, if a bit overwhelming.

In contrast, VO’s combat is immediate, twitch-based, and immensely rewarding. It is also a lot harder for me, but I relish the challenge. In my two-week trial of Eve, I didn’t lose a single ship. In Vendetta, blowing up happens every day. Of course, it isn’t as big a deal either.

Vendetta’s limited options with weapons and ships makes it easy to build a balanced, meaningful loadout. It also has a really good variety of different ship types (light/medium/heavy fighter, transport, bomber) without having an overwhelming number of options.

I think that, in the end, VO is more my style. It is better suited to casual play. It has a more open attitude (native Linux client, client plugins are encouraged, very open source-style release model). The public chat channel makes the game’s community very accessible; you can ask questions or just chat, and it makes the whole experience feel like hanging out on IRC (but with more explosions).

Eve Online has a lot of things that I want in a game, but it’s not quite casual-friendly enough for me. If Vendetta takes some cues from Eve in terms of the broader features, it will turn into a damned fine game. As it is, it’s enough fun to justify paying for it.

The biggest problem, by a long shot, is the player base. 60 players seems to be the absolute upper bound at any given time, at least while I’ve been playing. This is abysmal for an MMOG; there are FPS games that support larger numbers of players at a time. I might even be happy with this player base, if they did anything other than hang out in Sedina B8 PvPing. It doesn’t really feel like an MMO at this point, it has the feeling of a social dogfighting game.

A lot of noobs seem to appear, play for a few weeks, and vanish. I can see why. The player base seems a little cliquish, though not overly much. But you get the feeling that Veterans will always be Veterans, reminiscing about the glory days, and noobs will always be noobs, struggling to make a few credits in the face of vastly more experienced and skilled pirates. Of course, that’s when you find pirates at all. I’ve flown across have the game’s universe trading and never been pirated. Like I said in my previous post, it’s a ghost galaxy.

The numerous buggy things and realism-breakers are a turn-off, too. Capships in convoys don’t carry any cargo, so they’re worthless to both escorts (who get a “share of the profits” for their pay) and pirates. The cargo is simply an unlimited stream of widgets moving back and forth across the universe, with no great purpose in life. The convoy missions don’t always work, either; I’ve had several simply fail to end, giving me nothing and forcing me to abort the mission.

There is not a lot of variety in missions. After playing through the few available mission trees, the missions are all one of a few boilerplate missions. Fly out, kill some stuff, you’re done. Take this here, bring that back. Mine for lots of foo, get paid. Nothing more elaborate than that, which is disappointing.

I’m not cancelling my subscription yet. I’m giving the game a little more time to impress me. But at the same time, I’m going to try out Eve Online. You see, the MMO bug has hit me, and now I want a large, persistent universe full of people that I can fight with, trade with, and just generally game alongside. The space theme is more appealing to me than fantasy MMOs have ever been (fantasy has been done to death, is what it comes down to).

As far as roleplaying backstory goes, the science in Eve is surprisingly non-squishy, with a lot of modern scifi concepts making an appearance: quantum entaglement-based FTL communication, consciousness hot-backups, etc. Sure, the spectre of “jumpgates” (replace with “wormholes” at leisure) makes an appearance, but I can accept some foils for the sake of the story.

While I love twitch-based gameplay, I am a lot better at tactical/strategic combat. I think on my feet pretty well, but my reflexes suck pretty hard. I would probably find the combat in Eve more enjoyable, as a result.

If you ignore the combat layer, Eve has a lot of awesome features that would make VO great: player-owned systems, player-run economics (the materials you trade actually seem to come from a player at some point), and player-designed ships. All of these could have an analogue in VO, and if features like these were present, I would probably enjoy VO a lot more.

Of course, there’s also Jumpgate: Evolution. It’ll be interesting to check that out when it launches. We’ll see.

I love space shooters. Put me in a cockpit and give me 3 dimensions of unfettered movement, and I may as well be in Valhalla. Combat is secondary; fighting in space is fun, but just the feeling of (pretending to) pilot through the stars, skirting around asteroids, and maneuvering into docking bays is intoxicating to me. The chance to do so with other people in a persistent world is something I can’t pass up.

The space flight in VO is a very solid balance of realism vs playability. Contrast Vega Strike, which focuses on realism to a fault. In Vega Strike, it often takes upwards of 15 seconds to maneuver your craft into position for each attack run on an enemy. Also, to disengage your engines you have to throttle all the way down, and to turn without having your engines engaged you have to press a special key.

Vendetta Online, on the other hand, operates in a more enjoyable way; you only apply thrust for as long as you keep pressing one of your thrusters. When you stop thrusting, you maintain your current velocity until you thrust again. This lets you reorient your ship without changing your vector, which is very useful for targeting objects, getting a visual on enemy craft, etc. It also feels very intuitive and realistic (whether it really is realistic or not is irrelevant, see below). Moreover, you can apply thrust in 6 directions; forward or backward along the 3 primary axes (relative to your ship’s current orientation). The game controls refer to left (+y), right (-y), up (+z), and down (-z) as strafing, while forward (+x) is accelerate and backward (-x) is decelerate.

Having the ability to thrust in any direction is useful and fun, but it isn’t very realistic (well, not with the ships looking the way they do; a ship that could do that would need thrusters all over the place). This is where the fun > realism design mentality comes into play, and frankly it makes for a very fun game. Another unrealistic design decision is the existence of a maximum velocity. Sure, you could make some sci-fi sounding arguments for it, but honestly it’s a balancing mechanic, plain and simple. And in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The game world is vast; 30 systems with 64 sectors in each system (a system is a 16×16 grid of sectors). Each sector is “theoretically infinite” in size, although all of the interesting stuff is centered about the sector’s origin; after a few kilometers you find a whole lot of nothing that goes on forever. To get between sectors you can set a destination and ‘jump’ there. Likewise, to get between systems you go to special sectors that have wormhole areas, and you ‘jump’ while in one of these.

The game’s main RPG element (and I mean RPG-esque mechanics, not actual roleplaying) comes in the form of licenses. These are like a combination of level and skills in most MMOs. There are 5 licenses: combat, light & heavy weapons, trading, and mining. As you perform the eponymous activities, the skills increase. When they level up, you gain access to new ships, weapons, and missions. But the game remains primarily skill-based; in the hands of an incompetent pilot, the better ships aren’t that much better. I am afraid that I’m a testament to this fact.

The game isn’t perfect, though, and as long as I’m writing something like a review I’ll have to point out a few flaws. I hate to have to do this to you, Vendetta, but it’s for your own good. This will hurt me more than it hurts you.

The game world is big, like I said before. However, the player base is small. VO runs entirely in one instance, and you could easily fly across the galaxy and not meet another player. There are, on average, only 30 – 40 players online. This is alleviated a little by the fact that there is a cohesive world-wide chat, so communicating with the other players is easy.

I don’t know if there are more people on at other times of the day (I tend to play any time between 22:00 and 06:00 UTC) or if this is a low point for the year (more players during the summer?). Maybe the game is just old, and has lost most of its player base to attrition. At any rate, it feels like a ghost galaxy sometimes. I want to populate this world, to convince everyone I know to play and invade the VO universe en masse.

The other flaws in the game are fairly minor. You can only take one mission at a time, and many missions are automatically aborted (and thus failed) if you log out mid-mission. A network hiccup can destroy an hour of work (or more for mission trees that require you to start all the way over if you fail any mission in them).

In-system jumps and wormholes look the same. A more spectacular graphic for wormholes would be really cool, but on the other hand, the in-universe explanation for wormholes makes the modest special effects make enough sense.

There is also a stat called “grid” that weapons have but don’t explain. It refers to the total amount of power connected devices on your ship can use (i.e. the “power grid”). It’s kind of like a maximum voltage, and you can only use 20 grid per ship, although this is not explained anywhere. It’s not important until you get access to some pretty hefty ships, but it would be good to know about it, at least.

Other than these and similar minor nitpicks, the game is tons of fun and I foresee myself playing it for a long time. There is a free 8-hours-of-play-time trial available. My character’s name is Gjalfr. See you there.

While I was off not paying attention, it seems that almost all of my predictions have come true. An open-source server for running a simulator and/or grid, OpenSim, has been created. OpenSim appears to have solved many of the problems, and implemented many of the predictions, of my post from 2006.

One “problem” that remains, though, is economy.

The problem I outlined in my original post was that without a robust permissions scheme, economy would break down. Looking back, this seems terribly unlike me. Even in 2006, I had a strong dislike for anything that reeked of Digital Rights Management (DRM) even for the me that wrote that post. The permissions scheme employed by Second Life, after all, is just a DRM scheme. Like all DRM, it attempts to keep the user from using the things they purchase the way they would like, and like all DRM it is ultimately futile.

Economy on a Closed Grid

On the Second Life grid, you use real money to purchase virtual goods, which might have any of a number of permissions associated with them (modify, copy, and transfer). This permissions scheme is enforced by the fact that Second Life’s grid is a walled garden; Linden Labs controls the asset server, so your data all exists in their hands. They safeguard it, preventing nefarious users from copying your creations.

Except, not really.

Like all DRM, this scheme just plain can’t work. It can’t. It violates information theory. It is mathematically impossible to give something to someone and then keep them from having it. This is a corollary to the Law of Cake. I will elaborate.

For the Second Life viewer (aka client software) to render the object, it needs a copy of the object. This copy is necessarily sufficient to reproduce the object. Since any viewer that can speak the protocol can connect to Second Life, all you have to do is create a viewer that copies the object data being sent to it.

In fact, exactly such a viewer has been written. Linden Labs responded to this viewer’s existence by appealing to their Terms of Service. Whenever a user is caught using CopyBot, they are banned from Second Life.

In other words, there is no technical solution, only a social/legal one. This is because DRM is fundamentally flawed; it is trying to achieve the impossible.

Even without CopyBot, you could just decode cached objects from the official viewer’s data cache. Programs have also been created which do this as well, although they are harder to use than the infamous CopyBot.

The point of all this is that the assumption that the Walled Garden protects your Intellectual Property is simply false. As with the rest of the Internet, piracy is a given. Anyone creating and distributing content on the web must start with that assumption.

Economy on an Open Grid

I haven’t explored OpenSim enough to determine whether it supports any sort of monetary transaction, but let us assume that it does. In other words, assume that you can, via direct credit card payments or via a virtual currency, purchase virtual goods. Even if you can’t do this yet, I have little doubt that OpenSim will support it eventually.

Now, let us further assume that I connect to OSGrid via a region that I run myself. This means that I control my own asset server, where my inventory resides. If I purchase an object with restrictive permissions on another region, a copy of that object will be transferred to my asset server, where I can simply log in via mysql and change the permissions. Now, I can create multiple copies of this object, or give a copy to someone else.

What I have done here is to defeat DRM, just like CopyBot. It’s considerably easier, and much harder to detect. However, in practice this is no less secure to the Intellectual Property owner than Second Life’s walled garden. It still requires a reasonable level of competence (running your own grid/sim) to exploit, so piracy is likely to be similar in rate. Of course, the open metaverse has no Terms of Service (although individual grids/regions within the metaverse may). But the technical merits are the same; when looking at the threat of piracy, the open grid has the same basic properties as the closed grid.

Of course, even without our own asset server, we could still use the same techniques to copy data that I described for the closed grid. CopyBot and copying assets out of cache work identically on an OpenSim grid.

Not a problem

Okay, so the economy “problem” isn’t really a problem, just a fact of life. In the words of the OpenSim folks:

[The existence of piracy] is the kernel of the belief that open grids are hopeless for a virtual-goods economy. DRM discussion aside, maybe they are hopeless. But then, everyone thought the web was hopeless for selling music, and look at the success of iTunes in spite of all the piracy that still exists out there.

I am not proposing that piracy is good in any way, merely describing how it is inevitable. You simply cannot restrict how users will use the things you buy. You can’t keep someone from copying digital data, if they are determined enough to do it. You can use restrictive terms of service and try to sue or press charges, but there will never be a technological solution.

So, to current and potential content creators shying away from the open grids: piracy is an unfortunate fact of life. It will happen. Start with that assumption, and work from there. If this means you don’t want to create digital content, I’m sure the creative community will miss you. If, however, you realize that some people will appreciate your work enough to pay for it, without worrying about the details, then you are in the company of some fine artists.

Get it here.

I’m lifting my moratorium on D&D 4e, as well. This means that d20tools will eventually support 4e creatures. However, this is a huge undertaking, and I have to decide how best to handle it. I’m leaning towards a system that will allow anyone to write system templates; then, any gaming system could be plugged in, theoretically. In practice, this is a lot of work for a single developer, so I wouldn’t anticipate this happening any time soon.

The netjatafl server (taflserv) operates on a simple, completely open protocol; it will eventually support authenticated logins and statistics tracking. Anyone could write a netjatafl client for any platform, if they wished. My clients will all be in C++, because this let’s me reuse the ‘libboardgame’ library, which contains the game logic used by the server. I will also build in a “capabilities” system at some point, so the client and server can both advertise which games they support.

The whole thing is theoretically usable in its current state; the client is an ncurses-based text UI that is pretty cumbersome, but can be used. As far as I know, it only works in Linux. Anyone who wants to cross-compile it for Windows and send me a patch with everything you had to add, feel free! I will eventually add a proper GUI, probably gtk+-based.

Like the sound of this project? Feel free to check out the code, compile it, and let me know what you think!

Etymology notes: netjatafl is Old Norse for “net-table”; i.e. a networked table you can gather around to play games. ‘taflbordh’ is ON for ‘tafl board’ (tafl can also refer to tafl games in general), which sounds a little redundant, but it made a nice name for a client. And ‘taflserv’ is just ‘tafl server’… ‘serv’ was meant to be short for ‘server’, but I later noticed that it’s also a French word meaning ‘it serves”. I find this somewhat appropriate.

Recently, I pondered a fairly simple question: which of these games is the most complex?  All of them are complex enough that new players have room to become stronger over time.  Skill in these games has been traditionally praised as a virtue by each game’s culture of origin.  So, which game provides the greatest depth as a topic of study?

Before I consider the differences in the level of complexity of these games, let’s look at how a few basic elements of the games compare.  This will give us a fuller understanding of the factors that contribute to the games’ complexity.

Symmetry

Chess and Go have in common that they are symmetric games – both players have the same resources at their disposal, and seek the same goal.  In chess, the pieces for each player are arranged similarly at the start of the board, and each player tries to capture the other player’s king.  In Go, the board begins empty of pieces, and capturing territory is the goal for both players.  In both of these games, neither player has a handicap evenly matched opponents will have an equal chance of winning.

Tafl, on the other hand, is asymmetric.  One player, the defender, controls a king and his bodyguards, and tries to flee to one of the corners of the board.  His pieces begin the game arranged in the board’s center.  The attacker, on the other hand, has his pieces along the four sides of the board.  He also outnumbers the defender 2-1.  Tafl also favors the defender; if two equally skilled players play each other, the defender is nearly guaranteed victory.

Board Size

Tafl and chess are played on fairly small boards – 8×8 for chess, and anywhere from 7×7 to 13×13 for tafl.  The most common tafl board sizes appear to be 9×9 (Tablut) and 11×11 (Hnefatafl).  I will be contemplating a hnefatafl board here, because that is the size on which I most commonly play.

Go, on the other hand, is played on a 19×19 board. This means that, in general, far more moves are possible at any given time in Go.

Spaces vs Intersections

While we’re talking about boards, I will pause briefly to discuss spaces and intersections.  In Go, your pieces are played on the intersections of the lines.  In tafl and chess, your pieces reside in the spaces, or squares, between the lines.  This fundamentally makes no difference at all.  You could make a grid of 8×8 intersections instead of 8×8 spaces, and play chess on it.  It would feel unnatural, perhaps, but only because you would be accustomed to the other convention.  Likewise, you could play Go on a board of 19×19 spaces.  In fact, some variants of tafl were played on a grid of intersections, such as Alea Evangelii, a tafl game played on a 19×19 board (you could, in other words, use a modern Go board to play Alea Evangelii).

Capturing

Go requires a player to surround an opponent’s stones and ‘cut him off’ from all open spaces.  Capturing, however, is not the point of the game, only a strategic element.  This is also fundamentally true of tafl and chess; the ultimate goal is to surround the king; the capturing move is not strictly necessary.  Tafl’s capture rules are less straightforward than chess; you must ‘flank’ an opponent’s piece (place your pieces on opposite, orthogonal sides of the opposing piece) to capture it.  The king must be surrounded on all four sides (in most variants).

Construction vs Destruction

In chess and tafl, players begin the game with all of their pieces in place; pieces can be captured, but new pieces will never be added to the board.  In a sense, they are destructive games; the forms which are in play at the beginning can change and be eliminated, but nothing new ever appears in play.

By contrast, Go is a constructive game.  The board begins completely barren; players add pieces until the board is full of pieces surrounding empty territories.  Pieces can be captured, but the overall trend during play is toward a fuller board.

Complexity

So, how do these games compare to each other in terms of strategic complexity?  Go has a lot going for it in terms of complexity.  First, it is played on a large board, meaning there will always be more moves to consider.  In addition, the constructive nature of the game means it is legal to play in nearly any open space at any time.  This means that the number of possible moves in Go will always be much greater than the other two games.

Additionally, the strategic elements within Go are extremely intricate.  Opening moves can impact the later game dramatically, and individual ‘battles’ (sequences of moves on a small section of the board) have countless patterns and scenarios that players must be comfortable with.  Capturing an opponent’s stones isn’t always a good idea; often, nothing prevents your opponent from immediately capturing even more of your stones (and thus gaining territory) in return.

By stark contrast, chess and tafl have a fairly small number of legal moves.  For example, in chess, there are only 20 possible moves on the first play.  The average number of possible moves for a given chess game is something in the range of 32.  Tafl provides more possibilities than chess, even with fewer pieces; since all tafl pieces can move any number of spaces orthogonally, the attacker (who plays first) has 116 possible opening moves.  The defender’s first move has 120 possibilities.  Go, by comparison, has 361 possible opening moves.

In terms of capture rules, it is not clear to me whether tafl’s capture mechanics, which are more involved than those of chess, make the game simpler or more complex than chess’ straightforward captures.  In chess, the capture rules require you to keep track of more information, since each piece has a more complex influence on holding territory.  Go, however, is the clear winner here as well, as capturing can be extremely intricate – often when trying to capture a group, you may limit your own liberties and end up being captured yourself.  A significant portion of the game’s strategy involves creating arrangements of stones that cannot be captured.

Ultimately, my observations and subjective experience suggest that Go is the most complex of these games.  It has an amazing number of possible permutations, and a very simple ruleset that nevertheless lends itself to an immense number of factors that must be considered.

Between chess and tafl, the numbers seem to favor tafl.  The asymmetry,  larger board, and larger number of possible moves seem to make it more sophisticated.  However, as long as the game is skewed in favor of the defender, the complexity may mean very little in the end.  Mostly from subjective experience, I would estimate that tafl is the more numerically complex game, but this experience may be skewed by the fact that so many of the possible moves in chess have been so well mapped. The complexity of tafl also depends heavily on the specific tafl game and board size. Even subjectively, I can’t come to any real conclusion here.

It might void the warranty, it might put my life at risk or potentially damage the thing I’ve purchased, but it is my right as a consumer.

Nintendo takes a different view on the issue.  Owners of the Wii have long been able to employ a simple buffer overflow exploit in Twilight Princess to run custom code.  This exploit, called the Twilight Hack, allows a user to install, among other things, an application called the Homebrew Channel, which looks like any other Wii channel and lets you run other custom code without using the Twilight Hack again.  It’s the gaming console equivalent of installing a new stereo in your car.

Since the hack was made public, Nintendo has been trying to thwart it.  They have, to date, released three firmware updates that included code targeted to stop the Twilight Hack.  The most recent update succeeded at stopping it completely – it appears to detect the hacked save files and delete them, both on boot and whenever you insert an SD card.

So, all of this is standard fare.  Whenever a console launches, homebrewers will make it run custom code.  The console manufacturer will release an update to prevent this.  The homebrewers will work around it.  This process will continue in an escalating cycle.

However, Nintendo has delivered a low blow here.  Along with the System Menu 3.4 update, they changed their terms of service.

Now, that’s pretty cold – deleting our custom software?  Come on Nintendo, all I want to do is play videos on my Wii!  Also, the first time a fully automated background firmware update breaks something, the angry calls are going to pour like rain.  Power outage in the middle of a night-time firmware update?  Too bad!  But it gets worse…

Okay, at this point I feel it is crucial to point out a couple of things.  First, these quotes come from two documents, the Wii Network Service Privacy Policy and the Wii Network Service EULA.  Both of these documents are required, not to use the Wii in general, but to use the Wiiconnect24 services (the Shop channel, Nintendo channel, and Nintendo’s other online content channels).  So, to use their network, you agree that they may disable your system completely.  This means two things:

1. You can perfectly legally run hacked code on a Wii that does not use Wiiconnect24.

2. You grant Nintendo the right to break the law (destruction of private property) if you choose to use the Wiiconnect24 service.

Now, according to a lawyer I know, a contract cannot override criminal law, even if signed in full knowledge as opposed to clicked-through (the enforceability of click-through EULAs is still up for debate in the US).  So this clause is, by necessity, unenforceable.

So why is it there?  Nintendo has a juggernaut legal team, famed for its ruthlessness.  They can bankrupt any individual consumer with the legal proceedings necessary to challenge them, and it is unlikely that this will raise enough stink to get a class-action suit started.

I used to have some respect for Nintendo.

To that end, I’ve been thinking about how Second Life could be successfully decentralized, without adversely affecting the experience that everyone has come to know and love. I’ve identified key elements of the user experience that would be difficult to decentralize, and possible ways to handle them. First, though, we’ll talk about the basics; how could decentralization even work.

First, LL releases the code for the Second Life server. Now, anyone who wants to can host a Second Life sim/sims of their own on a server. A central repository would keep track of the existing sims, in a vaguely similar fashion to DNS (see The Grid, below). This would allow Second Life to grow without bound, with sims run by a multitude of companies and even home users.

So, how do we keep that Second Life experience without the centralized monolith of Linden Labs?

Economy
First and most importantly, the Second Life economy must be preserved. The economy has become the most crucial element to the experience; the ability to use real money, diluted down to a virtual quantum, to purchase other users’ custom created content. This breaks down into two sub-problems:

a) Managing the money. The most likely way to do this would be to set up a “bank”, wherein a single host (or several different hosts) manages all of the banking transactions. I’m thinking basically a system like paypal, where you buy L$ (“Linden Dollars”, Second Life’s currency) from the bank, or sell $L back to the bank for real currency. Each SL server would use this central bank system to check a user’s account balance, and make withdrawals/deposits, with proper confirmation on the part of the user, naturally. A public/private key system to ensure the user actually sent the confirmation could prevent abuse here, so no worries on that score. The SL bank could even be controlled by Linden Labs, as this would be a lot easier to handle than the entire grid, and still give them opportunity to have a strong stake in their creation.

b) Protecting Intellectual Property. This is a tricky problem, and the single hardest element to decentralizing SL. Since a huge portion of the money in SL is traded for users’ creations, there must be a way to prevent them from being stolen. Under a decentralized scheme, when a user rezzes an object on a sim, all the data for that object (textures, sounds, scripts) would necessarily be available to the owner of that sim. The most obvious solution I can find for this is to keep the object data elsewhere, and have a rezzed object be a pointer to that data. The advantage is that compiled scripts, raw texture data, and sound files stay on a secure server independent of their rezzed location. But where is this mystical server? I see two options here: either the data is on another sim, perhaps the user’s “home sim” (see User Accounts, below), or the data is in a central “asset server” (essentially the way SL works right now). Using the former approach, the client would have to make tons of connections to different servers to get all the data. Under the latter, the asset server would have to be extremely load-tolerant and robust, and all the data is stored by the same group of people, whose ethical integrity the SL user base would have to trust implicitly. Since both of these are flaws in the *existing* Second Life system, however, it is acceptable for the hypothetical exercise we’re attempting here. Also, under either system the sim owner’s creations could be stored on-sim for lower lag.

One other solution would be to create some DRM scheme that encrypts this data until it reaches the client. Of course, in all of these cases the client could be modified to steal the data. However, here we again reach the fact that these flaws are already inherent in SL, and there’s no easy way around them.

The Grid
The ability to bring up a map and scroll around, or teleport instantly to another part of the world, is an exciting part of SL, and another crucial part of the SL experience. Fortunately, the Internet already has a great system that we can build on – DNS and hyperlinking. We simply define 2 kinds of link: “landmarks” and “neighbors”. Each sim can have 4 neighbors, and neighbors must mutually agree to be neighbors (for a neighboring to work between sim A and B, A would have to set B as a neighbor and vice versa). The neighboring agreements would be stored in a central server system, modelled on DNS. A few recursive calls to this system and each sim can cache a portion of the overall grid map. Want a private island? Simply don’t neighbor your sim with any others. This creates user-level “peering agreements” that could create a more logical terrain (snowy areas linked together, etc) even if the landscape does shift from time to time.

The other kind of link would work just like landmarks in the current SL system. Pretty self-explanatory, except this system would make “click to teleport” objects a necessity, finally.

If a user searches for a sim on the map, the client can grab that sim’s cache of neighbors, and display more of the grid. The client could be configured to keep any amount of that information cached locally, for a more immersive experience.

User Accounts
There are two ways to handle user accounts: a centralized account server, or a sim-based account system. Under a centralized server, all accounts would be handled by, say, LL. This simplifies the system greatly, and aids in managing the asset server. With “home sims”, you’d have a system similar to Jabber, where user accounts are essentially user@home_sim. I believe the centralized system will work best, given that the asset server system seems to be the most logical way to do things.

Instant Messages
Well, LL is currently planning to re-implement the IM system in Jabber, so we’re pretty much covered there :P

So, in summary, we have a system that uses a centralized server for accounts and user-created assets, as well as a DNS-like neighboring system to create the world map, but grids are controlled by individuals, and hosted by companies just like web servers are now.