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It seems like the interesting thing about Metro 2033 economics and The World Ends With You economics is that the player is constantly having to choose between use value and exchange value. Now that I think of it, I've played with some map-makers within console games that have an interesting economic system. They will have a gauge that shows you how much RAM or whatever that you are using. As you place more stuff or make it complex, you lose some from your finite pool or resources. You can gain resources by deleting things from your map. I could see this type of system being put into a game for narrative purposes. I suppose the Elder Scrolls series does this to some extent when you have to destroy an enchanted weapon in order to make another, but it would be interesting if there was a quest where the mage's circle confronts you about your sucking up an unfair amount of the limited magical resources in your attempts to make a super awesome helmet. Economics is so hard. I think I might not really understand what capitalism is. Everything seems like capitalism to me. Still, it seems like games focus on trade more than they focus on production. That's not true either. That's what crafting systems do. I want a game to show me an economic system that I would never have imagined.

So identify scrolls become the de facto currency?

I really enjoy the idea of walking around someone else's minecraft world and finding clues as to what has happened. It's more appealing to me than Dear Esther.

I'm not suggesting that Team Meat will be putting markers for behaviors in cats, I have no idea how they are going to deal with the issue. Here is the blog post that makes me think that Mew-Genics is going to be the type of game where influencing behaviors and then trying to follow their trail of causation is part of the motivation to play: It's the FEB 23 post In reference to the symbolic importance of the NPCs, that's a great question. I can tell you that when I am playing with Artificial Life, I struggle to find ways to use the optional instructions and variables in order to represent human society. The protozoa have variables like "Distance from the sun" (it kills them), "distance from relatives", "distance from predators", "hunger", "desire"( which I believe is the ability to reproduce), "life" and "sleepiness". The protozoa that sleep a lot I associate with laziness. One time I had a culture where the lazy protozoa took over. Their prioritized behaviors were to sleep in a hiding spot where they couldn't be attacked and to go search for food when their life was low. I immediately interpreted this in reference to human behavior. Here was a culture of people who just stayed in their house and only went into public when they needed food. I think that it may help the suspension of disbelief when the organisms are represented as simple creatures. When that is the case, I tend to extrapolate the results of their behavior to fundamental behaviors of more complex creatures. It may be easier to go from simple to complex when interpreting. I can see how the complexities of people-behaviors could nullify the significance of a simulation based on simple ones. It requires a lot more personal rationalization for their actions and eventually seems over generalized.

In reference to large quantities of low-level simulations averaging into noise and lacking the ability to display the complex experience of the individual: Theres an iphone game called "Artificial Life" where these little protozoa swim around in a petri dish. They each have a set of 10 or so genes that are instructions for behaviour. The interesting part is that they mate with each other and produce an offspring that has half of each parent's instructions. You can click on one and change it's program and then see how well it survives. I think that the game suffers from the same design flaw as SpaceBase and SimCity. The two ways I've found to enjoy the toy/game is to use marker numbers in the instructions of an individual (like saying "move toward relatives when 33 units away" and "eat food when hunger reaches 33") and then following it around until it dies. Then much later, after I've been doing this for awhile, using different marker numbers, I'll come across a distant offspring of one of my creations and it will have a mixture of my instructions and randomly generated ones. You start to see the NPCs as sets of instructions that have managed to survive multiple generations rather than individual lives. When I see some of my instructions, I look at the ones mixed in that I didn't write and speculate on which combinations of instructions have increased their survivability. After about 10,000 in game years, you start seeing clusters of colors forming in the petri dish. You can click on various individuals in the cluster and they will have reached a certain level of homogeny in their instructions. I've seen some fascinating survival strategies emmerge. So my point is that I know of a way to display meaningful threads in games with large quantities of low-level simulations, it requires the behaviors to be self-replicating. In other words, it requires genetic algorythms: Allow the player to place markers on behaviors and then give them a way to recall those markers. In Artificial Life, it would be great if you could lower the visual opacity of everything without the selected marker for example. This would allow you to see patterns. I find this problem interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing how Edmund McMillen deals with it in Mew-Genics.

It's possible that I get this type of self-reflection feedback from computer games and their communities because I am willing to feel that they are more significant than they actually are. If my game experience shows me something that makes me feel less capable, I probably just go "Oh, it's just a game."

Like a fainting goat. That would be awesome.

What did it make you think about?

I am really enjoying the discussion about LoMa games and player behavior. I think that the environmental psychology of multiplayer game mechanics is incredibly relevant to so many of my interests, especially public policy. I know it gets mentioned frequently, but I still have to give thanks to the quality of responses on these posts. Someone even referenced the Dunning-Krueger cognitive bias to explain player behavior. Playing Super Monday Night Combat and Awesomenauts has demonstrated to me that the "feeding" mechanic creates an environment of exclusion. I can't blame the harassment on individual players anymore than I can blame dehumanization on individual students in the Stanford Prison experiment. In my view, the ability to check the score board to see how many times a teammate has died and the understanding of how that levels the other team up to the point that your team can no longer compete is not going to cause toxic behavior, but it's going to make it far more likely. That said, I enjoy those games very much. Time for some far-fetching extrapolation: I used to have a temper, but I rarely sucumb to it these days. Once I decided that it is never ok to be angry, I just stopped taking any actions while angry or justifying the need for it. But playing Super Monday Night Combat made me furious 20% of the time. I just bang on the desk and shout, I don't communicate my frustrations with other players, the only thing I might feel guilty about is waking up my cats. At first, my reaction was that i should stop playing the game, but then I started thinking about how this was such an amazing opportunity to expose myself to my own capacity for anger and accept it. Going into a match is an entirely voluntary decision that I can make at my own convenience. I can wait until my lady friend is away, the cats are asleep and I don't have to actually speak to anyone for 30 minutes plus the 20 minutes that it takes for my anger chemicals to stop influencing my brain. Then I can watch as the Assassin on my team continually fails to kill a group of three or observe the Support refusing to heal. For the first 200 hours of play-time, this would really piss me off. To me, one of the best things about games is that I can experiment with techniques, knowledges, and perspectives without much risk. In Super Monday Night Combat, over time, I saw that I would perform much more poorly when angry and that I would feel miserable afterwards. I've now become skilled in maintaining my cool, assessing the weakness of my team as a whole and trying to patch teamwork holes. A simple example of this would be following the player with the most deaths so that they can't get ganked as easily. You think that winning with a skilled team feels good, you should experience winning with an unskilled team that manages to work together! These experiences have gone so far as to affect my political views. Whereas I once thought that extreme Libertarianism was a viable option, I now see it as a naive fantasy, the morality of it aside, cooperation is so under-rated. I think that games have a massive potential to examine how environment can affect behavior of those who inhabit it. The debate over whether or not the game mechanics cause player behavior or if certain bad people are attracted to certain games is incredibly relevant to politics. Why does a no-broken-windows policy reduce crime? Are less crimes commited in neighborhoods with large trees because the criminals go elsewhere? Or are we as people far more susceptible to our environment and circumstances than we like to think? I think that multiplayer (and to some extent singleplayer) games allow for us as a society to rapidly prototype potential environments to promote positive behavior. And not only the physical environment, but the cultural paradigm. Do we as a society see the disabled as "feeders" that we wish would just uninstall? Do we see the poor as "noobs" who should know how to play? I think that a lot of us do and that it has an extrodinary effect on social policy. Through design and quantitative measurement, computer games can experiment with architecture of the space and of the perspective of players and then measure the resulting interactions. It excites me.

Do not be afraid.

Good point, we should probably get them to fill out a questionaire. Using their answers and what we know about the Rift, we will construct a predictive model. We'll have to refine the model as we learn more in order to avoid the akwardness of our claiming that they said things that they do not eventually say.

Imagine an open world, 64 player simultaneous multiplayer Journey. I want this to happen so I can see if players would end up flocking like blackbirds. The mechanic of flight when in proximity to other players could be emphasized by increasing wing power slightly for every other player within a small radius. I want to see this multiplayer mobility mechanic explored; I love the idea of video games allowing us to visualize different types of social interactions by defining the mechanics. I can't wait for a developer to say something like "We didn't want to make a game, we wanted to make a church in which you could have ecstatic social experiences that encourage you to love one another."

I would love to hear about your experiences with it once it arrives.

You mean "THE facial expression_".

I think there are a few interesting things to talk about in it.

I might be exceptionally gullible, but when movies and books have characters that affirm that they are real regardless of their fictional nature, it makes me more considerate. In movies or books though, my actions don't feel required (Tinker Bell lives if I don't clap; the princess in Never Ending Story gets named). In games, my actions are required. I felt guilt when I only played the demo of Faery: Legends of Avalon. Their world was most certainly encompassed by darkness when I didn't buy the full game. I wonder what the impetus is for a game writer to insist that the fictional characters are somehow real.

The game begins with your avatar affirming that he is not a fictional character, but a real entity in a parallel dimension. He even goes on to explain how he will reinhabit his body whenever you stop playing your DreamCast. Tinker Bell gonna die if you don't clap. I'm interested in that framework, when the work of fiction insists that it is not fictional. What the motive is for it, when it is effective and how it influences role-play. I imagine that it is a way to tell the player "You are role-playing as yourself, playing this game but pretending that it is real." This context works for me enough to think it is surreal for the player to go through the apartment and burglarize it. Then the player has sex with fictional dude's wife, not only knowing that she thinks it is him, but after he has had an opportunity to mention it to her. I wonder what the motivation was for having script ready in the case that the player decides to sex the wife disingeniusly . I haven't played the game so I don't know if these issues are eventually addressed by the narrative. It got me thinking about how my play-decisions in morality simulations affect my view of myself and whether or not someone else's treatment of fictional characters affects my view of them. This seems like a topic specific to the medium of games.

I don't know why, but there seem to be a lot of new people playing today. If you were ever considering trying this game out, this would be a better time to do so than most. It's still incredibly difficult and the community is typically venomous, but it is an incredibly deep and unique competitive shooter and Lords Management. If you do try it out for the first time, I recommend playing as Assault, or as Combat Girl and just killing bots as you follow around your teammates. By doing this, you'll get a better understanding of what all the pros are capable of and how games are won. Defense is incredibly important in this game (yet often ignored) so by killing bots in territory that your teammates are controlling, you can help your team and not get shouted at as much. The game has very high highs and very low lows. It's intense as far as competition goes. Don't forget it's free.

I'll have to play those games with this concept in mind.

That is a great example of what I am talking about. I'm also confused by my use of "ratio". I like thinking about them, so I must have just thrown that in out of habit. What I was trying to communicate was that I've begun to think of games with these question in mind "To what degree do the dynamics of the game seem similar to the aesthetic and vice versa? Are the dynamics making me operate with similar thought processes to that of the player-character?" An example of this would be Niko in Grand Theft Auto IV. As I walk around the world in that game, I see people everywhere, but the only way I know how to interact with them is to be violent. In this way, as a player, the dynamics of the game make me feel the way a former soldier from a foreign country may feel if he has been socialized in war and doesn't speak English very well. I would consider this specific relationship between dynamic and aesthetic to have a comparably high degree of similarity.

Good point. I am imagining you 30 years from now, at the end of a documentary about the rise and fall of the Oculus Rift saying in a retrospective tone, "But what we found out was that we didn't need to change the hardware, we needed to change ourselves."

Regarding your second point, I also thought this was a very interesting subject in the podcast. When Portal was used as an example, my ears unwaxed. I may be projecting my own philosophizing onto theirs, but I'm really interested in how a theme or aesthetic can interact with the dynamics of the game; specifically in examples where their relation seems complimentary and somewhat representational of each other. I think you may be talking more about the relationship between game space to explore and game mechanics to explore in your essay, but I focused more on their interest between mechanics and theme. If you are interested in this type of thing I think you may really enjoy this GDC talk Clint Hocking gave about where the meaning in games may lie. No pressure, it's over an hour long. If you are both curious and impatient, skip to the 14 minute mark. About to get really far out here: So when I take naps, I often notice that as I am half asleep, whatever procedure I have recently been concentrating on is being applied to somewhat random details of my life. An example would be that if I just spent an hour washing dishes and then I took a nap, my mind might begin thinking of ways to take the cats to the vet for their rabies shots by picking up the untreated cat, scrubbing it into a carrier, driving like hot running water to the vet and then parking at the vet the way I might place a dish to dry. I know that is confusing, I'm in the process of learning how to explain it to myself. This tendency of my naps to mix procedure (game dynamics) with details of my life (game aesthetics ) seems similar to the happenstance way that many games dynamics have aesthetic themes placed upon them. What I would consider more successful (and what I believe the Idle Thumbs cast was referencing during that reader mail) are when this marriage is between a dynamic which represents a seemingly valid perspective on the aesthetic theme or vice-versa. Portal is often the example that comes to mind. The player is solving a series of puzzles with prescripted solutions in order to slowly test their skill. This is also an accurate description of the theme. So I have begun thinking of game dynamics and game aesthetics in a ratio type of relationship. When they match, I get super excited. I want a word that refers to this quality. Another example which is far more ambiguous is Zoe Mode's Chime. Though there isn't a realistic association between influencing loops of music by fitting squares together and covering an area with solid blocks, the game suggests that relationship may be complimentary through it's confident execution. Its as if they are presenting me with an experience that I could believe a synthesete composer might have. I am really interested in this type of relationship, but haven't gotten to the point where I can describe it well.

I think you may enjoy this relevant neogaf thread. The original poster hypothesizes that the Oculus Rift could remove the necessity of gameplay for many environments. I agree. I also think that your ideas of possible VR uses for people with little exposure to video games is a fun subject to brain-storm. It's some Philip K. Dick shit thinking about going to a travel agency during a lunch break and some dude with a calm voice saying, "To Pyongyang again?" picking up the oculus to put it on your head as you sit in a massage chair.

Just started looking at the podcast forums and realized that the conversation there was intriguing. I love listening to the podcast at work, makes me feel like I enjoy smart things.