Not sure how many Brazilian readers I have, but I am going to speaking next week at the SBGames Conference in Sao Leopoldo. Latin America is one area that is usually off the radar for game developers, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the games market down there. I know Civ always had a sizable fan community in Brazil although I’m not sure how many of those fans actually bought legit copies of the game. As the PC gaming industry moves from boxed retail to online distribution, it’ll be interesting to see if these forgotten markets like Latin America, Russia, India, the Middle East, or even Africa become more important.

Gameplay is a word.

I have written a lot about game design over the years, and I have finally gotten sick of seeing the red squiggly little lines in Word show up every time I type “gameplay” – the closest thing we have to defining the essence of our art.

Here’s a list of words that don’t get the red squiggle from Microsoft:

plot
story
quest
character
dialogue
movies
graphics
polygons
textures
resolution
monsters
bosses
weapons
shields
spells
lives
victory
defeat
rewards
levels
cheats
walkthroughs
Xbox

…but no gameplay. Or replayability either. Hmmm…

Christopher Kline, lead programmer of Bioshock, just gave an excellent post-mortem on the project at a Montreal IGDA event. I always find it interesting to hear about design decisions which seem obvious from the outside but took multiple iterations to get right internally. Namely, the Little Sister characters started out as sea slugs and only ended up as young girls after a number of rewrites. Obviously, we feel a lot less empathy for slugs than children, and the game’s central moral choice – to harvest or to save the Little Sisters – would be a lot less meaningful without that empathy.

So, how did they start so far off the mark with the sea slugs? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the players would have a whole different game inside their heads once they are making a decision about a fellow human being? This question is key to understanding why good game design is so difficult. When you build a game from scratch, nothing is obvious. Games are only as good as the number of times your team can go through the design-implement-feedback loop. The sooner you start – and the wider a net you cast for play testers – the better.

Btw, does anyone know how I can embed this video without having it stick to the left margin?

Jonathan Blow, of Braid fame, recently gave an interesting talk at the FreePlay conference in Australia. (The video is available here.) His main point is that we are not asking ourselves “Why do I want to make this game?” Instead, we are usually asking “How” questions, such as “How do I get into the industry?” or “How do I get publishers to notice my game?” It’s an unusual way of looking at game development, and I bet most developers have never asked themselves this question.

I was asked a similar question a couple months ago by fellow Sporean (Sporite?) Chris Hecker – he asked if my game design had a theme. Was there a specific idea or experience that I was trying to convey to the player? The answer that came to me also answers Jonathan’s question. Namely, I want players of my games to feel that “no one choice is always right.” In other words, the challenge is adaptation, looking at a specific environment and finding a successful path. In Civ4 terms, if you start the game next to marble and stone, you might want to focus on wonders. If you start between Napoleon and Montezuma, you better make sure one of them is your friend. If you’re surrounded by jungle, better prioritize Iron Working; if you’re water-locked from the rest of the world, better get to Astronomy. Of course, in each game of Civ, multiple situations and challenges come at you at once, so it’s a question of prioritizing, deciding which opportunities to take advantage of and which ones to ignore.

So, why do I believe that it is important to understand that being flexible is better than being rigid? Why is it better to build a plan from your environment instead of forcing your strategy onto the world? The answer is my own philosophical background, my world view.

If the twentieth century has a single theme, it is that ideology itself is a dead-end, a failure. The growth of mass media enabled ideas to motivate people in ways never before imagined. Time and time again, these ideas allowed dogmatic leaders to demonize the “opposition,” which usually meant helping the strong to terrorize the weak. From the Nazi death camps to the Soviet gulags to China’s Cultural Revolution to America’s McCarthyism, the twentieth century was full of ideas that gave power to autocratic leaders not afraid to destroy the lives of those who resisted. Much as we hate to admit it, these leaders were supported by the masses of people who believed blindly in the ideas they represented. Before becoming a dictator, Hitler was initially elected to power. (“People will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”) For much too long, Stalin had an embarrassing number of communist apologists all around the world. (“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”) They are now primarily remembered as mass murderers.

I personally despise ideologies because they inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world’s problems. One set of solutions means all other options are heretical, which means they must be controlled. Ideologues put ideas above people, which is the beginning of terror and oppression. People are more important than ideas; in fact, people are more important than everything because they are, in fact, the only thing.

I don’t imagine that Civ4 tackles these issues as well as it could have, but I do know that my inherent distrust of ideologies does lurk under the surface of the game. Take the civics system, for example. Unlike previous Civ games, which let you could choose between broad labels like Democracy or Communism, Civ4 lets you build your government à la carte. You can mix State Property with Free Speech, or a Police State with a Free Market, or even Slavery with Universal Suffrage. Ideologues love labels because they dehumanize and obscure the opposition; both sides of the Cold War made liberal use of the terms “Communist” and “Capitalist” to differentiate each other, even though the United States government has slowly adopted communist programs piece-meal over the last century. Why exactly was the U.S. – a country with social security, medicare, welfare, a minimum wage, labor laws, and trade unions – fighting to keep Communism out of Vietnam? In fact, if you took a typical Red-fearing, trade-union-busting industrialist from 1907 and sent him 100 years into the future and explained how America now works, he would assume that the Communists won after all! Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civics system to encourage people to look behind the labels and at the actual choices a society needs to make when governing itself. It was no accident that I attached Mt. Rushmore to Fascism; carving mammoth statues of your country’s greatest leaders into a MOUNTAIN is fascist, even if we do not live under Fascism. Our own self-labeling as Democratic and Capitalist does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt people, real people.

Of course, discouraging rigid thinking is not the only reason I make games, but it is the best answer I can give to Jonathan’s question. If I ever get to release my dream strategy game, this idea will be clearly be at the center of the design. It’s good to have a reason.

So, Ensemble recently released a trailer demonstrating the gameplay of Halo Wars, their much-anticipated RTS for the 360.

This existence of this game is officially a Big Deal. Ensemble is one of a handful of top-flight real-time strategy developers, and the console RTS nut has yet to be cracked, despite some noble efforts. Presumably, the opportunity to lock up a console RTS from Ensemble was one of the reasons Microsoft acquired Ensemble back in 2001. (Wow, has it really been that long?) Attaching it to the Halo franchise must have been icing on the cake.

I have been following the game’s news (little as there was) since it was first announced, and I had been encouraged by reports that the game would be focusing on very small squads, perhaps suggesting a rethink of RTS for the new platform. Thus, I am a little disappointed by the new video as Halo Wars appears to be another real-time strategy game focused on unit wrangling, which becomes significantly more stressful on a platform lacking a mouse and keyboard.

There are nice touches here, to be sure. The full-screen build menu nicely solves the modal problem so common to console games. The graphical detail is, of course, incredible. However, the firefight near the end of the video looks just like your standard RTS headache. Trying to handle that many units with a joystick in such a high-pressure situation looks like stress, not fun.

At the very end of the video, however, there is a tiny suggestion of just how fun an RTS could be on a console. The human side has some sort of orbiting uber-weapon they can use to wreck massive destruction on a specific target. The console interface for this system is a snap – it’s simply a huge reticule. Just aim and shoot. Sure, it’s a strategy game, but why not? The effect is not unlike the God Powers of Age of Mythology, Ensemble’s PC RTS from 2002. However, this mechanic is a perfect fit for the console. Personally, I was hoping that Halo Wars would focus more on these types of interactions – ones where the player is taking advantage of the joystick interface instead of fighting it. RTS’s truly need to be built from the ground up for consoles, without the expectation of controlling multiple groups of soldiers. Ensemble is one of the best developers in the business (Age of Kings was probably my favorite game of the ’90s), so they are more than capable of delivering an awesome title. They just need to unlearn some of what they have spent the last decade learning on the PC.

So, how should an RTS on the console work? I don’t know, of course, but there are a few games out there that hint at possibilities:

Moonbase Commander: The Psychonauts of the strategy genre, this brilliant game got overlooked because, ironically enough, it should have been a console game. The mechanics are hard to describe; the simplest way I can explain it would be as a cross between StarCraft and Tiger Woods. In other words, it’s a land-grab, space-themed strategy game using a golf-swing game mechanic. The remarkable thing about the design was that a) it was a blast in multi-player and b) it would have worked perfectly on consoles, the native platform for most golf games. (Technically, Moonbase Commander is a turn-based game, but it moves fast enough that it “feels” like an RTS. Further, one could tweak the rules easily enough to make it work in real time.)

Rampart: This arcade classic has some similarities to Moonbase Commander in that it is a strategy game that involves firing projectiles at your opponent – a very natural action for a console controller. Rampart also includes a Tetris-style puzzle for repairing your castle. I would love to see a more detailed modern version with co-op play where one teammate focuses on rebuilding while the other focuses on lobbing cannonballs at the enemy.

Defense of the Ancients: The most popular Warcraft III mod by far, DotA is the natural progression of the hero-based RPG gameplay Blizzard introduced in the core game. Instead of controlling an army, the player controls a single hero, on a team with three other human heroes and AI-controlled grunts. The AI units fight the battle using standard RTS rules while the human heroes wander around the battlefield, acquiring levels and loot, while trying to turn the tide of battle in their team’s favor. DotA is still an RTS, but the player’s interaction with the world is confined to a single hero unit, taking away the mental burden of handling large groups of units. Obviously, consoles handle avatar-based games quite well. Judging from the popularity of DotA, a console version of this RPG/RTS hybrid is a hit just waiting to happen.

M.U.L.E.: If you’ve read my writing over the years, you would know this one was coming. You could make a convincing case that M.U.L.E. was the first significant real-time strategy game ever made. You could also make a case that it is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s a game of cutthroat competition where you destroy your opponents not with missile but by controlling the market, driving up prices while reaping huge profits. The auction mechanic was legendary for creating head-to-head conflict. You don’t know triumph until you’ve made your friends pay through the nose for energy. Most importantly, M.U.L.E. was designed for a joystick, meaning that consoles would be a natural fit for the proven gameplay.

I hope this list emphasizes that console RTS’s do not need to play like PC RTS’s. There are always more games out there to make than we can possibly imagine, and I don’t feel like we have scratched the surface yet for strategy games.

So, my design mistakes list made Polycast as well. They did a nice job going through all of my points. Once again, my story point sparked the most disagreements. To clarify, I am not against story in games. I am against the idea that having a story necessarily makes a game better. Many example exist where adding a story reduces the designer’s flexibility, such as in my Rise of Legends example. Everything you put into a game comes at a cost, and story is no exception.