Breaking into the Video Games Industry, Part 2: Strategies

Last week, I discussed the realities of the video games industry, suggesting that it’s actually a real job with real work, despite its coolness factor, and pointing out that breaking in is an uphill battle against a horde of seasoned professionals. For those still interested, what follows are some methods that might make it easier to break in. All of this is based on my experience, and other industry members might have other anecdotes of how one can get a job in the “biz.”

There are two major paths that I’m aware of to get into the video games industry: Connections and Qualifications.

Connections

Video games are perhaps one of the biggest bastions of nepotism on an industry-wide level. If you visit nearly any studio and get people talking about how they know everyone else, you’ll find intricate webs of family members and old friends tying huge swaths of the company together.

The CEO brings along the core members of his last company, they staff the rest of management with people that come highly recommended by their friends or people they’ve known for years and finally have a chance to work with, and then all of them fill in any positions they can with kids of an appropriate age. They hire creative directors that have produced past products that they enjoyed or whom they worked with previously, those guys snap up previous coworkers and gaming buddies, and those hires, in turn, recommend their own friends, family, and significant others.

Even if your inexperience doesn’t disqualify you from the application process, there’s likely to be multiple individuals that have the same inexperience but also know someone at the company, and will be more likely to get hired than you. From an outsider’s perspective, this sucks. It’s unfair. It makes it way harder to get in. But it happens for a pretty decent reason.

Every game studio is a huge collection of creative people that have to work together in various arrangements to get anything at all done. When you  have members of a team that can’t get along, can’t argue their agendas without it turning into a real fight, and can’t ultimately compromise on a solution that everyone can accept (even if it’s not anyone’s preference), it’s tremendously harder to get anything done.

Personal connections are, many times, the glue that makes a functional team. Who would you rather work with on a team: a competent but unexceptional designer who is easy to get along with or a very skilled powderkeg of emotions that is as likely start a fight as to produce something brilliant? There’s much less room for talented prima donnas in a team-based organization than there is for individuals that can get the job done without getting into arguments. So there’s a very real use for being able to look at an applicant and know that someone you trust thinks this person is also going to be cool to work with (or, even if he or she can be kind of a jerk, bonds of friendship will restrain those impulses from going too far).

So how do you make nepotism work for you instead of against you?

If you have a genuine friendship with someone that’s part of the industry, it doesn’t hurt to ask him or her to be on the lookout for opportunities or, failing that, to just try to get you invited to social events where coworkers will be present, and introduce you around.

If you don’t have a pre-existing connection, it’s a little more difficult to accomplish, but you can network. Large MMO guilds or other multiplayer clans seem to inevitably draw in a game designer or two that you can befriend (it’s an interesting quirk of the industry; there are probably, say, hardly any dentists that spend a lot of time hanging out in other dental offices in their free time). If you’re in a city with game studios, attending large roleplaying gatherings or video game nights is probably a good way to meet people who work at a game company or have genuine friends that do. If you can get into game developer conferences or even local IGDA meetings, those are sure places to meet professionals (though they may not be there to make friends).

In either situation, it’s important that you either be very clear that you’re trying to network or very interested in actually making friends. If you’re essentially just using people to get a job, be open about it or they’ll ultimately feel manipulated. It defeats the entire purpose of vouching for people.

Also, try not to be a prima donna. Even once you get into the industry, it never hurts to step back and realize that the people you’re talking to are likely just as smart and creative as you, but happen to have a different opinion. If you can prove that you’re cool to work with, you’ll have lots of people happy to vouch for you in the future when your current gig inevitably starts laying off designers to go to other companies.

Qualifications

Some people do manage to get their first job in the industry without knowing a single member of the company before submitting a resume. Nearly all of these people have an education in programming, art, or some other vital skill.

The reality is that game designers and writers are the least privileged class of industry professionals (though, in my—clearly biased—opinion as a game designer/writer, the most important to the success of a game). There’s a continuum between coming up with a bad plot/system/mission and a good one, and just about anyone can jump in on the low end without training. Conversely, being able to program/script, make 3D art assets, etc. are all skills that require some level of training to even attempt. Sit any random guy off the street in front of a word processor and ask him to write the story for a video game and he’ll likely attempt something. Sit him in front of a 3D art program and ask him to make a creature or level and you’ll get a far different response. Whether it’s fair or not, nepotism has a lot bigger sway when people are hiring writers and designers, because there’s an awful lot you can learn on the job and designers have to work on teams and compromise more than potentially any other specialty.

So, what that means is:

• If you’re interested in entering the industry as a programmer/scripter, artist, or some other specialty that requires up-front training to even attempt, you should be set. Make sure to put forth as much effort as possible in school so you’ll be able to pass programming tests and/or have a respectable portfolio to show off and you should be able to eventually find a studio that’s hiring junior members of your specialty. Congratulations.
• If you’re interested in entering the industry as a writer/game designer, it pays to crosstrain. Some degree of skill scripting in programming languages is very helpful, because, unless the company has a comprehensive toolset, at least some of the process of adding content to the game requires scripting. If you can do that yourself, rather than having to team up with a dedicated programmer, that makes you more valuable.

Other Strategies

If none of these options are available to you, there are three remaining strategies:

• Go to a school that pushes internships in a city with a large number of gaming companies, and avail yourself of this opportunity. Even if you don’t get paid, an internship gives you an automatic way to make friends in the industry, to learn valuable skills, and maybe even count it as job experience. Figure out how to afford it, and make sure your school can place you.
• Look for QA and other entry-level opportunities. It will probably mean low pay for a while, but is just as useful as an internship at making friends. You’ll probably get promoted internally if you stick it out for long enough and your talent and personality mesh with your desired destination team. However, while QA is generally an entry-level job, it’s also a valid career for which you might compete with better-suited individuals; it’s possible to be an excellent tester without having any potential for design, and vice versa.
• Apply for every industry job that looks even a little interesting and for which you meet the requirements. You never know when you might find a company that’s just hasn’t gotten targeted by a lot of more experienced applicants and is willing to give you a shot. Do make sure to do your due diligence on the company and its owners if the job requires relocation or will otherwise hurt your future if you take it and then hate it or the company goes under soon after you join: any job is often better than no job when you’re just starting out, but you don’t want to get into a situation from which you can’t recover if it goes bad.

Just make sure, if you get hired in a role that is not your preference, that you don’t alienate people. Phoning it in with one department while obviously trying to get into another is a clear way to avoid making friends. Do the job you signed on for as well as you can, make friends in your anticipated destination who will speak up for you when a position opens, and learn everything you can from anyone who will teach you.

Ultimately, it’s important to take any foot in the door, because opportunities are limited and competition is intense. Once you have a couple years of experience and a network of industry insiders that know that you’re safe to work with, getting successive jobs should become progressively easier.

Breaking into the Video Games Industry, Part 1: Realities

A friend of my father’s has a son interested in getting into the industry, and she asked if he could contact me to get some advice. He hasn’t yet, possibly because having your mom come home from work and suggest asking one of her acquaintances for advice isn’t exactly what a 21-year-old wants to do, but, if he does, I can point him here. Besides, I already put the thought into it, so here it goes.

Note: All of the information in this post and the following one is clearly based on my own anecdotal experience and that of people I’ve talked to about the subject. Other professionals in the industry may have a different experience, and it’s worth getting advice from anyone that seems to have a decent basis for it.

Making video games is a very attractive career for the modern young man (and not a few young women as well). A recent commercial for a for-profit school shows a couple of young guys lounging on a couch in front of a big screen, discussing where to put enemies. Who wouldn’t want to get paid to be literally an armchair designer?

It’s very seldom like that.

While working in this industry is probably one of the most interesting, fulfilling, highest-paying careers for a young person that loves playing games and whose skills tend towards the white collar but don’t necessarily extend to the truly specialized, it is, actually, a job a lot like any other. You’ll spend long hours in front of a monitor doing data entry. You’ll have to meet deadlines, go to meetings, and report to managers that you don’t always see eye-to-eye with. You’ll need to produce quality work on someone else’s schedule and may get in trouble if you can’t.

But, at the end of it, if everyone did it right, fun comes rolling out. You get to point at a game and take rightful credit for it. As I said, it’s still a job, but never forget that it’s a really cool job.

So how do you get to work on games?

That’s the tricky part for most kids. The distressing thing about the video games industry is its turnover rate: there are very few old and established gaming companies the way there are old and established firms that host most other white collar jobs. Even games published by the industry giants generally come from small studios employing only a few dozen people. For these companies, if they don’t continue to produce profitable games, they might get cut off (or, in the case of certain recent debacles, might get cut off because the publisher wants to keep all the profits). Startups are in an even worse situation: they need to constantly convince their investors that a profit is still in the offing or risk having the venture capitalists cut their losses and cut off funding.

What this means is that there is constant churn in the industry. One company fails after a couple of years and all its employees, now a couple of years better qualified (with the resumes to match), start hunting for positions. It seems like there’s at least one company with dozens of layoffs every month or two, especially in the current economic climate, which means there’s always at least a handful of trained professionals that could potentially be competing with an inexperienced prospective designer for any job. A lot of companies offering “junior” positions still require a year or two of experience, because they get enough applications from industry veterans that they don’t need to take the risk of untested talent. It’s possible that the only reason new blood gets into the industry at all is the occasional periods where the industry is growing and the loss of experienced workers that are looking for a more secure career, like (insert humorous, dangerous career of your choosing here to complete the joke).

So, despite this competition, how can a young person optimize his or her educational experience (or make use of an existing one) with an eye towards entering the video games industry? Tune in next week for the answers.

Rolling without Reason: Gamism vs. Narrativism

I’ve been speeding up my Rise of the Runelords game in order to finish before a player has to move away. This involves a lot of going through the remaining modules and figuring out what I can skip with minimal impact on the story but a lot of time savings at the table. While I’m mostly cutting whole side quests and such that are interesting but mostly thematic filler, another thing I’m noticing a lot more is rolls for no reason. The two examples I noticed in particular are one where Will saves are necessary to force though a set of magical barriers and one where Climb checks are needed to get up oversized stairs. In neither of these cases in there likely to be any time pressure or other consequence for failure: the players will just keep rolling until they get it.

Many modern games, particularly ones with a strong narrative focus, explicitly recommend that GMs not call for rolls unless there is an interesting result for both success and failure. If that’s not the case, the GM is encouraged to simply narrate the result, taking into account the character’s skills. But this method seems at odds with the intuition of a gamist.

This conflict is, in my experience, most evident in the use of the Perception skill (or whatever it’s called in a particular game). Many GMs I’ve gamed with have an innate response of “roll Perception” to most queries for information from the players, even if there is no real time pressure and the GM wants the players to have the information. Conversely, at least for my players, “I search…” statements are automatically followed by lifting a die to prepare for a roll, and they often seem disappointed when I just give them the information (usually, “there’s nothing here to find, don’t bother rolling”).

Put simply, many players and GMs seem to have the core notion that a result isn’t meaningful unless it comes from a die roll. Narrating a result strips out the notion of success against difficult odds. In the RotR examples, even though there’s nothing interesting, narrative-wise, about rolling until you succeed, for the gamist, rolling to see who climbs to the top the fastest is a meaningful difference (even if the disparity in Climb skills makes it obvious who will win). Similarly, some Skill Challenges in D&D 4e seem set up so the adventure can grind to a halt if not successful.

At root, this all comes down to the growing attempt by tabletop games to create mechanics for everything else that are as robust and enjoyable as the mechanics for combat. In many games, but D&D in particular, there’s often very little chance that the PCs won’t win any given fight (unless they jumped something they shouldn’t have jumped). However, the results of combat are granular enough that there are clear gradations of winning: did the party make it through without a scratch or did they get injured? How many limited resources were expended for the win? So far, that experience has not been replicated in the non-combat parts of games (though many systems try with social conflict, to greater or lesser success). It seems to me that, with rolling outside of combat and with Skill Challenges in particular, the goal is to capture the fun of combat in the rest of the game, but, without creating a game with as detailed a list of options and resources for everything as for fighting, this isn’t really possible.

Ultimately, the converse might be easier: simplifying combat so much that it doesn’t differ so drastically from every other skill roll in the game. Would a game where combat was resolved as simply as anything else ultimately streamline the desire to roll for situations without interesting consequences? Or would it just make for a boring game?

Theory: Stages of Characterization in RPGs

I had a theory and would like to hear opinions on whether this matches the experience of other gamers:

Roleplayers tend to go through several major stages in roughly the same order as they enter the hobby and portray different characters. Some players very quickly move through the stages, while others will hit a particular stage and stick with it. Some players will even return to an earlier stage at times. No stage is intrinsically better than an earlier one, but there is a general trend along the line. Understanding what stage a player is currently in can give insights into how to make games fun for that player.

In order, the stages are:

1. Roleplaying as Self Insertion: A player in the earliest stage is brand new to the hobby and most characters are intrinsically similar to the player. No matter which character picked (X), the character is actually “me as X.” This could be “me as Aragorn,” “me as a ninja,” and so on. How the character behaves is quite similar to what would happen if some magical event actually moved the player’s consciousness to a skilled body in a fantasy world: the character’s goals are intrinsically tied to what the player finds interesting. A player in this stage is able to be hooked primarily by intuiting what he or she would find exciting given a different set of skills and a consequence-free environment.
2. Roleplaying as Wish Fulfillment: A player in the next stage has begun to craft characters with their own distinct motivations. However, the character’s goals have not become completely disentangled from the player’s own desires. Thus, the player is more likely to respond to goals in game that match his or her own longings in life (which may be anything from the ability to kick butt, create a stable home, or find true love). A player in this stage is able to be hooked primarily by intuiting what he or she is missing in actual life and providing it as escapism.
3. Roleplaying as Personal Growth: By the third stage, the player has finished exploring insertion of self and personal goals within an RPG, and has begun to fully see games as a chance to deliberately deal with his or her own issues in a consequence-free environment. Intentionally or not, most characters created during this stage will reflect the player’s own insecurities or personal development goals, even though their other traits and goals might be quite different. For example, a player trying to develop leadership skills will make a lot of characters intended to be party leader and will try to take this role. A player with a passion for music but little chance to practice may make a series of musicians to see what life might be like if that path was pursued. A player in this stage is able to be hooked primarily by intuiting which personality traits the player is experimenting with and giving opportunities for those traits to shine.
4. Roleplaying as Novelty Exercise: At the final stage, the player has portrayed a long series of characters and begun to crave roleplaying challenges. These players will often try to create characters that are interesting and completely independent from his or her own goals and desires; if the character shares traits with the player, it’s either coincidental, or the player is choosing to make some parts of the character easier to portray to better focus on the different parts. Essentially, the player is experimenting with bringing a three dimensional character to life. A player in this stage is able to be hooked primarily by intuiting what makes the character interesting to the player, and giving him or her chances to shine within that space.

The Transliteration Problem

MMORPGs are in a weird position: halfway between multiplayer video game and virtual world.

A virtual world’s central tenet is immersion, in that it is trying, ultimately, to create something that feels like a real place, even if not a real world, to its participants. The goal is to get users to create a shared space that at least has verisimilitude, even if it doesn’t have realism. A successful virtual world is one where users log in consistently because it feels like a vacation spot where all their friends are.

Multiplayer video games have a different agenda, frequently: fun. The trappings of the system aren’t as important as providing an enjoyable game experience for the people that log in: either cooperatively or competitively. It’s a rare multiplayer game that actually achieves anything like immersion, as the kind of play that stands up to multiple players is hard to blend with true immersive touches: the chance that someone is going to do something out of character goes up exponentially for each added user.

Virtual worlds can sometimes bypass this problem by virtue that so many people will be there for the shared illusion, rather than any other motives: if the world doesn’t even have much gameplay, those there are the ones that want to treat it like a world.

MMOs try to straddle this line, and, going beyond, differentiate themselves on the third tier: entertainment (e.g., story). There are very few major MMOs on the market right now that aren’t based on recreating an existing IP (or, at least, an easily definable story genre). So MMOs are almost all trying to be a triple threat: an immersive virtual world where users will come just to hang out while creating an atmosphere of fun that has people exploring the game mechanics of the system together, all the while providing enough veneer of entertaining story to draw in those who don’t just want to escape, but to escape into their favorite story.

It’s next to impossible to do all three things right, because they’re all in some ways competing styles. The interesting thing is seeing what each MMO achieves, and thinking about why they did it that way (and whether it was a good idea).

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about this due to the free City of Heroes weekend after several months of playing Champions Online.

City of Heroes is decently immersive: it works very hard to explain away as many gameplay conceits as possible within the setting, and create lots of opportunities for people to mingle. It has fun multiplayer gameplay: there’s good synergy between the character types without precluding having success with any random group, and everyone has something to do. But it’s a terrible transliteration of comics: no matter how much work goes into the mission descriptions, they’re still all about entering random buildings and obliterating foes in a craze of particle effects. It’s no more representative of comics than dressing up as your favorite hero to go bowling: fun if everyone is doing it, but not really the same as being a superhero.

Champions Online seems to have tried to do the opposite. The world looks, feels, and plays like an (admittedly farcically campy at times) four-color superhero story. Missions exist to do a variety of comic style things, combats are often clear and varied in ways similar to comics, and the art and VO are designed specifically to feel very similar to a superhero theme park, if not to a comic exactly. This is the problem, though: the game can’t be immersive because it’s not much deeper than the Marvel Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios. Comics can get away with only focusing on the fun parts, and skipping boring travel with, at most, a few scenes on the team’s jet. Champions tries to do this by squishing every significant area into a couple of square miles of each zone. Unlike CoH, there’s very little dead space on any of the maps: story content fills almost every place you can visit. Paradoxically, though, the dead space is precisely what makes the game feel like an actual world (which is full of space where nothing exciting really happens).

In the end, players are choosing between the two games based on graphics and loyalty and gameplay, but the real differentiating factor is immersion vs. story: one game made a somewhat functional world designed with superheroes in mind, while the other actually tried to tell superhero stories, no matter the consequences on the space.

Maybe when DC Online comes out it will do an exceptional job of feeling like both an exceptional comic story and a living, breathing world, but sacrifice gameplay to do it. Then players will really have an excellent trio of choices to meet their exact MMO needs.

GNS in Video RPGs

One of the core ideas of indie tabletop game design is the GNS principle/Threefold Model: as I understand it (probably not completely accurate), games can target three modes of play/preferred player styles. The styles are typically understood to be:

• Gamist: The rules and systems are emphasized such that much of the fun of play comes from using the game engine. Games that emphasize cool powers, complicated rules-based play, and tactics that are to some degree metagame are often considered gamist.
• Narrativist: The story is emphasized such that much of the fun of play comes from making your game feel like a book or movie. Games that subordinate actions or tactics that don’t support the story to those that do are often considered narrativist.
• Simulationist: The physics and verisimilitude of the world are emphasized such that much of the fun of play comes from treating the setting like a real world with real consequences. Games that have extensive rules designed to model reality that then ignore them if a result seems unrealistic are often considered simulationist.

These elements are often represented as a triangle, such that the more focus that is put on one element, the less that can be put on the others. A single game can rarely do all three elements well, as compromises to make an interesting game system work with a full-on realism simulator that still produces a satisfying traditional narrative tend to weaken all aspects.

I hadn’t really considered in great detail whether these elements applied to video RPGs, as most such games are forced by the limits of programming to favor certain elements over others, particularly as far as being unable to have true simulationism in the way a human-moderated game can have. However, after beginning to play Mass Effect 2 and see how different it is than its predecessor, I’ve begun to believe that there is a threefold model that can apply to video games that might be just as valid as the one for tabletop games, drawing on slightly modified principles:

• Fun (Gamist): A game that focuses on fun is concerned with carefully balancing the game engine, skill systems, and challenges to ensure that the player is constantly having a fun and engaging play experience that is not too difficult or too easy. Most video games fall fully into this mode, but RPGs and some other genres may break away due to the other modes.
• Entertainment (Narrativist): A game that focuses on entertainment is concerned with telling an engaging story that is almost as fun to watch as to play, and leaves players discussing its ramifications later. Many modern action, adventure, and roleplaying games focus on this mode to some extent, with varying degrees of compelling story.
• Immersion (Simulationist): A game that focuses on immersion is concerned with creating a world that feels like a place people could actually live; barriers to travel are disguised and game elements are placed in logical rather than practical locations. RPGs, mysteries, and some adventure games strive for immersion.

Ultimately, like the tabletop model, strengthening one element weakens the others. A well-balanced and enjoyable gameplay experience often makes it hard to hide the game elements enough to create immersion. A fully-realized and entertaining story may make demands on game setup that reduces the fun of actual play. An immersive play experience often rejects the taking away of control from the player required to tell a good story.

Like tabletop GMs and designers, video game designers should be cognizant of what mode of play they want to support and support it consistently. A game will likely be far more memorable if it does one mode and does it well than if it is ambivalent about what style of play it wants to produce.

RPG EXP: The Current Level Conundrum

Originally posted December 2007

I’d been thinking about this after playing Serenity, but reading through the Buffy books I got during the Eden $5 sale really drove home the problem. A lot of skill-based games have two different systems for character generation (the earliest examples of this I’m aware of are White Wolf games, but pretty much every game that isn’t level based or Chaosium-style use-based is like this now). During character creation, you buy all your statistics out of a pool of points, where the level of the trait doesn’t mean much (e.g., raising a skill from 1 to 2 or from 3 to 4 costs the same amount of points). This is probably done to speed an already slow character creation process.

But once you’re in play, you switch to a completely different system for raising traits with experience points. Almost always, it’s cheaper to raise low traits by a level than it is to raise higher traits by a level (it might cost 1 point to raise a level 1 skill to 2, but 3 points to raise a level 3 skill to 4). This seems to be done out of some combination of simulationism (it doesn’t make sense for it to be just as fast to master a knowledge as to learn the basics) and player gating (to discourage PCs from singlemindedly maxing out their traits rather than dabbling).

The problem with this is that it’s heartbreaking to systems-minded folks like me that want to buy traits appropriate to the character but don’t want to gimp our characters in the long term (okay, I admit it, I’m a power gamer in some respects, but it also means that hardcore power gamers have a dramatic advantage over casual players). Essentially, the character generation system makes it efficient to concentrate your points on maxing out your key traits rather than spreading your skills out:

In a simple current level system for skills, you could buy one skill at 5 and one skill at 1 or two skills at 3. Assuming you wanted to eventually max out both skills to 5 in play, it would cost 10 EXP in the first case (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 to raise one skill from 1 to 5) and 14 EXP in the second case (3 + 4 + 3 + 4 to raise two skills from 3 to 5). That’s a 40% difference in cost and that’s on the smallest scale.

In almost all cases, it’s drastically more cost-effective to take any low traits that you don’t expect to need immediately in play and move their points into traits that you’d eventually like to have high. Sure, you’re an idiot savant for a few sessions, but you can quickly round out your character with low levels of EXP. And it doesn’t help that most EXP guidelines seem to be written with the expectation of playing twice a week; for a less frequent game, it becomes more and more pressing to blow your EXP on low level skills, since it will take forever to save up enough to see any improvement buying up high-level skills.

And what’s really baffling me is the Buffy-specific EXP chart. During character creation, you can use freebie points from drawbacks to raise qualities or skills. In this case, qualities are radically overpriced: the major benefit of additional levels of the 5 point Sorcery quality is to give you a +1 to magic rolls (whereas those 5 points spent on skills could give you +5 to magic rolls). However, in actual play qualities cost a tiny fraction of skill points; I read a review pointing out that the Sorcery quality that’s overpriced during character creation is far more cost-effective to raise than the magic skill with EXP. This makes my head hurt.

Anyway…

The moral of the story is that I think I’m just going to stick with trait-level-agnostic freebie points for EXP in future skill-based games I run. (I’d use an exp-based system for chargen, but I think casual players would hide from a blank sheet and a huge pool of EXP.) If it costs the same to raise a trait from 1 to 2 as from 3 to 4 in character creation, it will cost that much with EXP too.

And if this encourages unrealistic or twinkish spending behavior, I’ll just ask the offenders nicely to stop it, and then everyone can benefit from consistent improvement at all skill levels to the traits they want to buy.

Bartle’s Four and Fantasy Fiction Styles

Originally posted November 2007

So I was thinking about the two main types of fantasy fiction: empowerment and disempowerment. That is, is the story about a hero that is consistently awesome, facing regular minor setbacks to allow development and chances to shine, or is the story about a hero that gets buried under hardships until finally scraping out at the last minute by overcoming nearly impossible odds? Enjoying one or the other usually depends on whether you’re willing to follow the protagonist into darkness in order to receive an even greater emotional thrill when he finally overcomes.

Then I realized that there were a few other fantasy styles, particularly in gaming, that didn’t exactly fit one or the other. Mystery stories typically feature a protagonist a step removed from the normal pull of the plot; whether the protagonist is empowered or disempowered is usually tangential to the throughplot of the narrative. Less common in fiction but more common in games is the tactical story; what’s good for the story takes a backseat to the cunning of the players, and whether they’re empowered or disempowered is completely up to their savvy in outmaneuvering the opposition.

And if all those are viable, the four styles seem to map loosely onto the four video gaming styles: achievers to empowerment (they like to succeed), socializers to disempowerment (there’s often more to roleplay and talk about when things are going poorly than when you almost always win), explorers to mysteries (it’s all about finding new things and noticing clues others have missed), and killers to tactical (it’s about outthinking the GM/rival players).

Which is all to say: I wonder if you can tell what kind of story-driven game a player will prefer if you know his or her Bartle type.

Musing: Text to Speech to Text

Originally posted July 2007

So I was playing with this text-to-speech demo earlier. Then I was thinking about this Richard Bartle article on how cool it would be to have an MMO that could use voice chat to do speech-to-text, transcribe it to the chat window, and also text-to-speech it to change your voice chat to sound like your character.

Then, I remembered this neat video. It’s apparently a face rendering program where they made a big average face composite out of a lot of different faces, and tagged it with the different ways it might deform when deviating from the average. Apparently, they can come up with fairly accurate looking 3D models of faces from single 2D images, by mapping the deviation from the average and then applying that to the model and extrapolating from there.

So, I’m wondering if the same type of thing could be done with voice recognition. Record a lot of random people reading through a long series of text, and split out their recordings into pitch, tempo, inflection, and all of that and create a tagged average voice. There might be some underlying constants you could find across all speech, or you might have to tie it to ways of phrasing individual words.

Then, someone takes the system, reads some standardized text to establish a baseline, and the system maps that person’s vocal deviation from the average voice. When the person chats online, the system has a tagged way to do speech-to-text. Additionally, the system can take what was said, remove the user’s deviation (leaving the average voice plus unusual stresses and pacing) and then apply the deviation of another voice that represents your character. By keeping the inflections and stresses that were unusual to the user’s normal deviation, and applying them to the synthesized voice, you might come up with a much more natural sounding text-to-speech/voice-masking output.

Stephen’s Theory of Good Gamer Scarcity

Originally posted June 2007

Based on the latest 20 sided blog post, and having dipped my toes in the murky waters of the real-world Looking For Group channel a lot lately, I have a theory.

Good Gamer: Any roleplaying gamer with a minimum level of social skills and hygiene that is fun to game with.
Bad Gamer: Any roleplaying gamer that, through dint of poor social skills, poor hygiene, or other factors is simply not fun to game with for a large portion of the gaming population.

Good gamers will tend to stay in their gaming groups until outside forces make that impossible (e.g., have to move, group disbands due to family pressures, group can’t meet often enough to sate one person’s gaming need, etc.).

Bad gamers will only join a group for a few sessions until they help the group tear itself apart or simply cease to be invited to games while the group carries on. Bad gamers only stay in a group long term when the rest of the group simply has no other option but to keep the gamer or be unable to game at all (sometimes, the latter is preferable). In this case of extreme scarcity, there probably isn’t a local gamer pool to speak of anyway.

When good gamers look for a group, they will either:
A) Join an incompatible group (possibly with bad players) that is likely to tear apart, or
B) Join a compatible group of other good gamers

When B happens, the good gamer will be off the “gaming market,” possibly for years.

Given an equal mix of good and bad gamers, grouped at random, breaking up if there are too many bad gamers in the mix, chance alone will eventually result in most good gamers being grouped with other good gamers. The number of ungrouped bad gamers will stay consistent.

Therefore: In any pool of gamers looking for a new gaming group, bad gamers will be drastically over-represented at any given time, even if they make up a small fraction of the total ungrouped gamers over the course of a longer period.

Conclusion: For any organized attempt to match gamers, the chance that you will wind up gaming with bad gamers will rise dramatically in relation to the chance that you will wind up gaming with good gamers.

In other words: Game matching services are doomed from the start to only really be useful to cat pee men that you’d never let into your house otherwise 😀 .