Once upon a time, playing a roleplaying game meant getting together with friends over a table, and having a gamemaster handcraft an experience for you. There is, let me assure those of you who have not had the experience, no sort of gaming so fine as a roleplaying campaign with a first-rate gamemaster, and with friends who are genuinely committed to roleplaying. It is, in its own way, the n'est plus ultra of gaming, the sort of experience you cannot have in any other fashion, direct, and meaningful, and emotionally impactful; more fun, at times, than you can have in any other way, at least with your clothes on.

Since the inception of the digital RPG, tabletop RPGers have been rightfully suspicious of the whole genre; digital RPGs are not, in any meaningful sense, role-playing games. That is to say, you take the part of a single character in an imaginary world, as in a real RPG; but min-maxing, and winning, is your objective, and actually getting into to the role of someone unlike yourself, and acting and speaking as your character would, is way beyond the point.

MMOs get a little closer; it's at least possible to separate yourself from the level grind for a moment or two, and actually engage in repartee with others. Yet there's a big difference; a canny gamemaster rewards this, but there are no in-game rewards, in an MMO, for anything other than the level grind. An actual conversation from my EverQuest experience:

Some Dude: Yo! Bitch! Gimme buffs.
Me: Sirrah! Dost thou address a lady thus?
Some Dude: Why you gotta talk that way?
Me: If you don't want that, why are you playing on a roleplaying server? (And unsaid but thought: Schmuck.)

Yet in another way, the difference between a tabletop GM and an MMO (or a digital RPG) is, in essence, the difference between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter. For several thousand dollars, even today, you can have a tailor make you a suit, carefully hand-made to your dimensions. Or, for several hundred dollars, you can buy one off the rack -- in the argot of couture, prêt à porter, meaning "cash and carry," the English idiom being "ready to wear." It won't be as sleek, it won't fit you quite as well, but it will be adequate, and a whole lot cheaper.

Tabletop roleplaying is, in essence, bespoke gamemastering; a person who knows you, and your gaming group well, is carefully structuring an experience for your pleasure. Naturally, there are good and bad GMs, just as their are good and bad tailors, but an effort is being made to create an individual experience.

MMOs are, to coin a phrase, prêt à jouer (ready to play): a faceless company far away has spent a great deal of time and effort creating a scalable experience suitable for large numbers of people, and infinitely replicable, in the hope that a sufficiently large mass audience will find it sufficiently appealing to pay their ten bucks a month, or whatever. An MMO is ever and always a pretty unsatifying gamemaster, from the perspective of a tabletop player -- and yet, it's always there, and doesn't rely on you gathering a bunch of friends for a session, and even if it isn't great, it's usually -- adequate.

Of course, tabletop gamemasters, unlike bespoke tailors, have not been able to turn what they do into a profitable enterprise. With some rare exceptions (mystery party weekends, corporate roleplaying exercises), no one has been able to establish a market for bespoke GMing -- and so gamemastering remains, as it has always been, something GMs do for their own entertainment and egoboo, and for the entertainment of their friends. More's the pity; good GMs are priceless, and in a perfect world, they should be able to extract a price.

But the distinction here suggests another route: Between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter we have something else: Designer clothing. Many people are unwilling to pay the price required for bespoke tailoring (or, on the feminine side, haute couture), and yet are willing to pay a premium over commodity clothing for the sake of a designer label. To be sure, in some cases, this is merely a matter of slapping some celebrity's label on clothing that would otherwise be considered a commodity; yet in principle, and in many cases, it's something of a compromise between individual exclusivity and mass-market dross. At least in some cases, designer clothing is an expression of individual creativity, designed to appeal to a narrower market than the mass.

Can we find a similar middle ground in gaming?

I think perhaps we can -- and I'll suggest several places where we may see it emerging.

1. Some of the larger Scandinavian LARPs--while remaining non-profit entities--now employ people, part- or full-time to plan for the next major event.
2. ARGs and "big urban" games like those created by area/code games are hand-crafted, short-term experiences for a limited, if still large, audience.
3. Companies like GoCrossCampus are using a standard rules-set, but hand-crafting experiences for large numbers of people in environments with definable end-games.

None of this is exactly big business -- today. And yet I wonder whether there's something viable between bespoke GMing and the bland facelessness of MMOs -- the roleplaying equivalent of the Designer Label.

The gameplay is simple, like a sock, and also like a sock, it can be turned inside-out. People or robots are coming down a conveyor belt. Click to slam down your machines, killing the people, building the robots. A partnership for a better tomorrow.

You can get a refreshing sense of pace out of mastering this, the efficiency you take in to maximize your score -- leave no robot incomplete or human alive. It's kind of chilling, in a totally innocuous, Habbo Hotel-esque pixel-sprite kind of way. As you the player internalize the efficiency you need to thrive, you become more roboticized. The use of complementary play modes could be extremely interesting until you realize it's the same mechanic, same dynamic, just different aesthetics. So you have to wonder, would this same vibe come from a different mechanic?

Overall, a solid arcade game with a clever subtext, with some leverage between them.

Well, we've been working on a new business plan, and I think perhaps it's time to go public with it. Click here for the investor presentation.

A simple, clean little game, Floating Light is a level-based Flash title in which you must blow a bubble to each level's exit, avoiding the walls (which pop the bubble). You blow by moving your mouse pointer (an arrow), clicking the button to exhale, as it were.

Very simple structure, but curiously engaging, and a nice minimalist/ambient musical score. Scads of levels, and should you run out, there's always Floaty Light 2.

I wrote Fatherhood partially in response to your (Greg Costikyan's) earlier essays on games-as-art. In particular, the "game's criticism" article strikes home to me. I wanted to make a game that withstood criticism by possessing more than a surface layer of messages. We've all seen or read over-analysis of games that read meaning that likely was never intended: support for communism read into Super Mario Brothers, for example. There are also games that make their agenda clear, Hidden Agenda as an example. Or games, that while the specific agenda might be unclear, are so simple that one is left no choice but to try and look for a higher reason to explain the existence of the game -- Passage falls into this category.

My goal with Fatherhood was to make a game with an agenda, but not let that agenda control the game. The Catch-22 I've put myself in is that I do not think it is necessarily right for me to explain my agenda -- that would seem to defeat the whole purpose of wrapping a game around it. But, then, what to do if the agenda is completely missed by those who play it? One interpretation is that the author is dead -- if the readers miss the agenda, the agenda does not exist. But, perhaps, it does exist, but is operating at a subconscious level not picked up readily?

All this text leads to this simple conclusion. I will explain what game mechanics I added that were motivated around achieving my underlying message, along with said message.

Goal of the Game: Transmit the feeling of "Fatherhood" to players. Since Fatherhood is hardly a simple emotion that could be captured in a seven day roguelike, I picked two simple aspects. One is discipline. The second is being a role model.

Discipline is a very difficult task. The implementation in Fatherhood is through three commands: praise, scold, and talk. My philosophy is inspired from two sources. A GDC presentation (I think in '99?) by a psychologist who trained inch-worms hammered home the point that positive reinforcement is superior to negative reinforcement. She also addressed the other question: why is this so counter-intuitive? The answer is that negative reinforcement produces immediate results while positive reinforcement doesn't. In Fatherhood, if you scold your children, they will immediately return to rock piling. If you praise them while rock piling, however, there is no immediate result -- they still will break off to play tag. However, repeated scolding will result in children that only briefly rock-pile before they revert to running around and playing tag -- they learn that this pattern gains them the most attention. Repeated praise will instead lock them into rock piling -- while they enjoy tag, they prefer the attention of their parent. The underlying game mechanic is intentionally simple. Children seek the activity that maximizes attention (or, if another child has received more attention than them, they ape that child's behavior). Both scolding and praise count as attention -- however, the attention is applied to the activity they were performing when the scold/praise was applied. Thus, scolding a tag playing child teaches them that tag will gain attention, while praising a rock piler teaches them that rock piling will gain attention.

The third form of communication, talking, is implemented in response to ... ack, I don't have the book on hand. In any case, the key insight was the comment that whenever you find yourself saying "How many times do I have to tell you?" you should have a red flag go up that you've already told them too many times. Children are quite capable of understanding the first time, but, if given the chance to feign ignorance, they'll happily lead you to talking for hours rationalizing and re-rationalizing your arguments. As such, the "talk" command is wired up to do nothing.

Now the second agenda: being a role model. There are many, obvious, positive aspects to being a role model. However, the tough part is the realization that they are always watching you. You only have to goof-off and portray an unsafe action once for them to pick up on it and emulate it themselves. This is governed by how the children behave around the natural dangers. By default, they do not travel very close to the water or fire - they will keep a fixed number of squares away. However, whenever they have line of sight to you, they will check how close *you* have gotten to the water and update their own safe distances to correspond. This means that if you walk next to the water the kids will also be willing to walk next to it, which can lead to drowning if the water decides to advance that tick.

I had hoped that the high-score mechanism would encourage people to try and win by saving more farmland/forest. In my
play testing, to do real aggressive stopping of the flood/fire you need the help of your children. Maybe I just need to make the goal of increasing the score more clear so people don't see it as necessarily complete when they merely stop the flood/fire.

When historians look back on the fall and decline of the American Empire, the most wry among them may remark that the transition was from an attitude of "Don't Tread On Me" to an attitude of "Don't Taze Me, Bro!".

4 out of 5 scientists agree: the United States is rapidly descending into fascism. (1 out of 5 scientists funded by DARPA). Fortunately, the worst instances of this tend to emerge indirectly, through seemingly isolated incidents, like when somebody asks in public if John Kerry is a member of Skull and Bones. Totally isolated incidents with no pattern whatsoever.

In the tradition of Flash mobs (which are going to be tracked by the NSA and headed off at the pass, going into the future) and Ghandi (dead) comes Police Brutality, a game by Jason Rohrer that explores how vocal dissent can disrupt police's efforts to taze people. The game has you, as the lone leader, shouting. As you do, other people are galvanized, and become available to shout, or move, blocking police. The goal is to prevent anyone from being evicted from the premises; you achieve this by playing the numbers of the crowd against the lesser numbers of police, divide and deter.

It's interesting, because the way the system works actually makes you think these tactics might be effective. But would they? Certainly violent protest would be swatted down, but more subtle forms might work, as this paper explores. I would argue that the methods demonstrated in Rohrer's prototype are only effective in certain contexts, and that when successful, the leverage in favor of the crowd wouldn't come from their expressed dissent so much as the risk of liability that might result from multi-party escalation. That would only make sense in the context of university security officers; good ol' fashioned porklice have a much more mild risk of legal backlash for any of their abuses, and as such may take cause to escalate things past the level of merely restraining individuals. The game implies that the worst thing to happen to you is for a cop to handcuff you and pin you down, but what about back-up? What about the various loopholes that allow prosecution of people for "participating" in violent protest? Because the game fails to scale to the higher levels of conflict intensity that the machine has contingencies for, it fails to provide a robust education of effective counter-brutality tactics. It would work for a town-hall meeting in Potsdam. It would not work in a "free speech zone" in NYC.

That said, the game provides an interesting window in the tactics of winning hearts and minds, which is the secret war that has defined society for over a century. It's good that there's exploration in this direction, as prototypic as it may be.

Ed: See also Liberal Crime Squad and A Force More Powerful.

Created by Iikka Keranen and Rich Carlson of Digital Eel) (developers of, among others, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Plasmaworm and Dr. Blob's Organism -- all computer games), Goblin Slayer is an asymmetric boardgame in which one player controls a dwarf entering a cavern infested with goblins to retrieve an artifact.

The board consists of seven large hexes printed with smaller hexes, and is laid out semi-randomly prior to play. The dwarf player controls only a single dwarf, while the goblin player controls 12 goblins (or, optionally, 10 goblins and an ogre -- my advice is, take the ogre). The dwarf and ogre move two spaces a turn (though the dwarf can't attack if he moves more than one), and the goblins move one space a turn. Prior to play, the goblin places the artifact and two "hero's stones" on the map, in any hex or hexes; the dwarf player begins in possession of one stone.

Each large hex contains a "tunnel" hex; goblins may enter a tunnel and go into the goblin player's pool. Killed goblins also go to the pool. The goblin player can enter goblins from his pool into tunnel hexes, one per such hex.

After both sides have moved, the dwarf may kill 1D3 adjoining goblins (the ogre takes two "hits" to kill); the goblin player then rolls 1D6 and, if he rolls less than or equal to the number of goblins adjoining the dwarf (the ogre counting as 2 goblins), the dwarf dies.

Thus, the dwarf moves to the treasure, picks it up (and may optionally seek out the other hero's stones), then moves out, while goblins try to surround and kill him. Stones can be expended to: a) allow one extra hex of movement, b) add one to the number of adjoining monsters killed, or c) as a "saving throw" to prevent the dwarf from dying (which is probably how you'll use them).

It's playable in about 15 minutes, and not a bad little game to play while waiting for other people to take their turns in a more intense game, or while waiting for another game to start; it is, however, largely a die-rolling exercise. Yes, there's a little bit of strategy in terms of move planning by the goblins, and deciding when to use the hero's stones, but not all that much, and the winner is likely to be determined by luck rather than cleverness.

Still and all, it's free.

Fatherhood is a Rogue-like, at least to the degree of being a turn-based ASCII game, with a command-set that will be familiar to players of this type of game. However, it's certainly not a dungeon-crawler -- indeed, there's no combat whatsoever.

The basic set-up is this: on a randomly generated map (some pre-generated maps are also included), some number of rivers are about to flood their banks, and some number of forest fires are burning. You're a Dad, and your three kids are running about the game as well -- they start near you, but have a tendency to wander off. You can halt fires and floods by picking up boulders and moving them to choke points -- and you win by making sure that neither you nor any of your kids drowns or is burned to death.

You can also tell your kids to do things, and yell at them to come toward you, but kids will be kids, and they don't always pay attention.

It's not a deep game, but it's certainly a novel approach to Rogue-like design; it's also fairly easy to win on most maps, unless you crank up the number of floods and fires to a high number during map generation (though you can be screwed by initial placement -- the map is algorithmically generated).

The download includes both Linux and Windows versions -- no Mac version as of yet, but the download includes the source, so doubtless somebody will do a Mac build at some point.

In a recent comment, miwi asked what game design books I would recommend.

All have flaws, but three I think worth reading are:

Game Design, by Bob Bates (long time designer back into the InfoCom days) -- light on theory, but strong on practicality.

Game Design: Theory and Practice, by Richard Rouse -- a little heavier going, but smart and informative.

Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton -- less focussed than the previous too, but more willing to encourage experimentation.

And three that are not directly about game design, but worth reading for what they are:

Rules of Play, by Salen and Zimmerman; somewhat academic, and heavy going, but a strong introduction to design from a game studies perspective.

Theory of Fun, by Raph Koster; idiosyncratic, but thought-provoking.

Patterns in Game Design, by Bjork and Holopainen -- very dull, and tough sledding, but think of it as a laundry list of a huge number of different game mechanics. As an exercise, it's worth flipping the book over to three different pages, and thinking about how you'd create a game using those three concepts as core.

Your mileage may vary.