BobbyBesar

Easy calculation: # of years Walt Disney has been dead + 20.

Oh, you can't make Superman stories without DC's permission? That's too bad. Somebody should tell Miracleman, Mister Majestic, Samaritan (Astro City), Supreme, The Plutonian (Irredeemable), Apollo, etc. As mentioned later on the 'cast, "Superman" stories still abound, even without the license. In fact, there's very little about the Superman character that cannot be appropriated into a non-licensed property and still recognized as such. Really, the only thing that is protected are the names and likeness. In that regard, we're probably lucky that our corporate overlords are Disney, who are singularly unimaginative in what they protect. As you noted, Mickey Mouse is nothing but likeness: he doesn't have any distinguishing characteristics aside from image, instead simply taking whatever form the current story required. As a result, that's all that Disney sought to protect. If DC comics / Superman had been the ones leading the IP charge, I suspect that things could have turned out much worse for other creators. I'm also not sure that I follow Chris's point about how limiting access to these properties limits the ability of good (fan-based) work to get recognized. In the marketplace, it's still going to be virtually impossible to break through into the popular consciousness, perhaps even moreso if you're competing with other creators in a literally undifferentiated marketplace. I also don't know that I agree that such works that become shared cultural touchstones won't ever be available again. The power of Superman is his mythic quality: that's why he recognizably survives so many variations. There isn't a similar list of variations on Spiderman's mythology (Invincible, kinda-maybe?). Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, all these have a certain amount of mythic power. Very few works have the right factors to become integrated into the modern popular culture in this way, so the problem with the modern world may not be that the IP laws prevent it, it may simply be that we're too interested in eating our own tail (remakes, etc) and less so in creating work, and besides, as per the good old Sturgeon's Law, a recent dearth doesn't necessarily mean that anything has changed. Those kinds of works probably only come along once a generation or so anyways, even in perfect conditions. The recent prominence of the zombie mythos is a perfect refutation of your argument. Zombies are a recent invention, but they aren't "owned" by George Romero, or The Walking Dead, or anybody else. It's still possible to create shared cultural touchstones even given the current state of IP law, you just need an idea that's powerful enough (and versatile enough) to support it. Uh, also, since we're talking about unlicensed variations and Sherlock Holmes, I feel a responsibility to mention Ruse,

Regarding navigating environments naturalistically, I think part of the problem is the problem of affordances. Every action that a player is capable in the game is an ability explicitly granted (afforded) to the player, requiring explicit implementation. Players know this, and so if you allow a player to do something, you are inherently instructing the player to do it. When walking down the street, you don't explore every building that's opens because you have no need to look at every hotel lobby and bodega. But in GTA, because it's a designed space, you do. The only places you can enter are the ones that have a gameplay function. Therefore, you should enter every building you can. If you could walk into every store in GTA (instanced into randomly generated mini marts), paradoxically, you no longer would want to. Developers make it even worse by hiding things in out of the way places, therefore explicitly rewarding you. Even in a game like Skyrim where you can pick up lots of garbage, you can still only pick up items that are specifically designed for it, so the affordance problem remains. Implementing it halfway actually can be even worse, because then players want to explore the system you created, to see how far the interactivity goes. If you could literally pick up any rock, or any leaf, in Skyrim, your desire to pick up random garbage in the outdoors would likely decrease. This applies not just to environment design, but to game design in general. If there is an implementation for something, people will assume that you are supposed to do it, because all implementations in games are explicit. Which is why editing down to the core of a gameplay idea is so important.

The podcast hit most of the salient points, but I did want to note a couple things: It seems like you bounced back and forth between historical-disruptive events and gameplay-disruptive ones. These are sometimes mutually exclusive. As noted, historical disruptions are hardly a surprise, so things like Mongol invasions aren't a useful discussion in terms of disruptive gameplay. Re: the Godzilla-defense simulator. I think Dave(?) was overstating this point. This is only true if you build a city differently to defend against Godzilla than you would against alien invasion. Otherwise, it's irrelevant to your gameplay decisions. More to the point, monsters in Simcity are fun for 2 reasons: 1. The core activity is building a city. Monsters allow you to continue engaging in this activity. It doesn't shift goals or mechanics at all. 2. It's fun to watch monsters blow up a city. The second point is really important from a design perspective, even if it isn't a strategic factor. Also, I think there's something that was alluded to in the discussion but not addressed. In order for disruption to be fun, it has to feel fair. But "feeling fair" has a lot of variables. If it comes too near the end of the game, you can get screwed without chance of recovery. If it comes too near the beginning, it becomes irrelevant. Something that has a 1% chance will never feel fair unless you play way more than 100 games. There was a discussion a while back about how (I think) one of the Fire Emblem games has a "view percent" and a "true percentage" - which varies for your attacks of the enemies. If the UI says an enemy has a 50% chance to hit, this true percent was like 35%, because that what "felt like 50%" to players. Meanwhile, if the UI says that player has a 50% chance, he actually has a 60% chance. I've been playing a lot of Ascension recently, and the deck draw there can be hugely disruptive to any strategy, particularly with Event cards (which apply a global effect that favors a certain kind of card). But they don't feel "bullshit-y" because Ascension games are so short. I feel like there's some kind of formula that can apply here: Player acceptance = event importance * event frequency * event predictability / length of game But there are some specific mechanics discussions that would be interesting to talk about. A disruptive event seems perfect for a deck-mechanic: something is going to happen, but you don't know which one. I do also wonder how fore-warning affects a player's acceptance of a random event. If you had a 10 turn warning that plague was coming somewhere in your empire, with progressively clearer hints where it would hit (People are coughing in Asia Minor...people have fevers in Turkey...Plague in Constantinople!), could you work that into a grand strategy game?

Your comments about how having content you don't see adds value were interesting. However, I don't think it's just a case of the audience being insufficiently sophisticated, or unused to having multiple paths that causes some players to be unhappy with the thought of missing content. A big part of it is that you have to ensure that the game mechanics reinforce the idea of having multiple exclusive paths. For instance, in Mark of The Ninja, there are those Haiku scrolls hidden around the levels. This means that the player is actually being explicitly told _not_ to allow any path to be unexplored, because the scroll might be hidden there. As a result, unexplored paths become not tantalizing hints of what could have been, but a big empty box on a checklist. Also, Bartle's player types, explorers,etc. That hardly needs to be mentioned. I will say that as a sometimes producer of games, I feel bad when I know that there's content that I haven't seen, not just for myself, but for the developer hours that must have gone into making that content. It feels disrespectful to the developers not to see everything.

With regards to XCOM squaddie chatter and the "moments between", I wonder if any of you have played Xenoblade Chronicles. It does a pretty good job of integrating relationship / helper mechanics into an otherwise relatively typical JRPG battle system. Fire Emblem also, famously, includes relationship mechanics based on unit adjacency during battles.

Hey, sorry to break up the Civ stories for a moment (I don't have one of my own, my only real 4X experience is MoM. I know, *shun*). I blog over at therulesonthefield.com, and I think it might have accidentally broken your off-turnening of comments over at Flash of Steel with trackback links. Sorry about that. If you'd rather I didn't, I could try to disable trackbacks for any links to 3MA in the future, although I admit I don't actually know how to do that. Posting in this thread because you ended the show with that entreaty to bring discussion here instead.