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Creative process: character design or discovery

When a player starts a new character, the creative process sits somewhere on a spectrum between designing a fleshed-out background and creating a skeleton to ‘discover’ the character over time.

As an example, I preferred the latter for Joron, a character in Star Wars Galaxies. When I originally created him as a throwaway character to explore a new server, I decided I wanted a smuggler from Nar Shaddaa. In order to avoid the standard “my parents are dead” syndrome, I decided he was raised by a single mother who did a spectacularly poor job. Then I figured out why he was on Tatooine, and since I was much newer to RP then, I used the old new player tutorial where you got rescued by the Empire, ran around on their ship, and dumped in Eisley. Everything else developed naturally over time, whether via RP or cooperating with other folks looking for hooks for their own characters.

Conversely, with Kudon in EVE Online, I got very detailed. I started with the focus I wanted: a Minmatar combat pilot. From there, I looked at the background that fit him during the character creation, wrote a story or two that defined how he got his start, and directed his skills towards his concept. The process was far less organic and far more engineered. While I enjoyed the time I spent writing, planning, and fusing, he didn’t stick with me as much as a character that developed “on his own” over time.

Even if a player lets his character develop, usually he has some sort of concept in mind, be it nebulous or detailed. Sometimes that comes from some other famous character or person, or what seems to fit the class / profession that the player wants to use, or from the player himself.

Much like in writing, the overall process likely varies tremendously from player to player (and even from character to character). Sharing our approaches can lead to more interesting, deeper characters and greater immersion.

Casiella: Running the Threads

NB: As I was thinking about the upcoming Walking in Stations in EVE Online and what it can mean for roleplay, this story nearly wrote itself. I don’t believe that we can reflect this directly in the game, but this does represent the flavor I hope to see. Story continues after the break.

Casi felt like an insect high on boosters. All those facets of the eye… they had to be something like this. She’d already tapped into the surveillance camera drones slowly swarming around the joint. Not much security on them, certainly not for somebody who’d been doing this out in the deep. With their feeds all registered with her implant; she closed her eyes and let herself float in twelve places at once, watching the vaguely erotic holo-projections of sinuous shapes on the walls. Hovering wait-carts bobbed slightly in the air currents as the desperate looked for their last chance at companionship for the night, whether human or chemical.

Continue reading ‘Casiella: Running the Threads’

4 ways to bring forums into Web 2.0

Forums essentially descend directly from the “ancient” bulletin board systems, in many ways the original social networking applications (other than email). But most of them don’t take full advantage of everything we’ve learned or implement common features from other social applications.

I spend a lot of time on a specific community that primarily uses a forum (SMF in this particular case) for almost everything. Many communities use these applications as sot of a “poor man’s CMS”, particularly as the community organizers and leaders don’t necessarily have a great deal of expertise in web applications or system administration. While a number of applications (bbpress, Google Groups, etc.) do have support for some of these mechanisms, I’d particularly appreciate a third-party indexer that builds upon existing sites, maybe through scraping.

The mechanisms I want to see

1. Share out comments I’ve written into my lifestream. Some of my posts on forums I frequent really don’t have a lot of value, but some of them took a lot of thought and concern.
2. Follow comments from my friends. Other indivdual posters frequently have intelligent, thoughtful posts in threads or sub-forums I don’t normally read, and I’d like to subscribe to their posts.
3. Find other forums where my friends participate; after all, if we spend a lot of time interacting with them in one context, we likely share interests and potential friends.
4. Search across forums similar to how Google enables us to search across blogs. Currently, forum posts do get indexed but a special “forum search” would help lead to #2 and #3 (particularly if it had an API).

Current fiction reading list

The stuff I already have at home and still pending.

Coyote by Allen Steele
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Socially networked MMOGs

I recently started playing a new MMOG on a trial basis because I have family members who play it. The game itself doesn’t seem to be holding me for any number of reasons, but two things stood out to me as the trial has progressed:

First, as noted, what pulled me to the game had nothing to do with the content, the mechanics, or anything directly controlled by the developer and publisher. My social connections pulled me into it: I have a sibling that lives halfway across the country. We didn’t grow up together, but now that we’re adults, we’re trying to find ways to have something approaching a normal relationship. Since we both are definitely gamers, this fits naturally. We’ve tried three different games so far, including this one. Whether we stick with the same game or not doesn’t really matter, but trying to does.

Second, when I mentioned all this to some friends, several immediately asked what server I was on, class, faction, etc. This includes folks I didn’t even know played the game. I’m confident that it holds true across other games, too. I likely have friends in a lot of games and don’t know it.

Why can’t I find friends from Twitter, email, other games, social networking sites, IM, even forums? Because they don’t share their graphs. (Any such architecture clearly would need an opt-in design; privacy is a sine qua non.) I don’t know who I know there, even if they’d like me to know. Web 2.0 and social networking fit naturally with MMOGs for any number of reasons, but the fact that “community” always represents a core building block should rank high among them.

Developers really miss major business opportunities for customer growth and retention here. If they make it easy for me to see that I have 17 friends in a game and that 10 of them are on the same server, I’m much more likely to want to try it, no matter what. And if they can provide the tools to stay tightly connected to my friends in their game, I’m likely to keep playing and even go out and try to get other friends to play.

CCP says that EVE Online will be adding some social networking tools in 2009, though I have yet to see any meaningful details on that. Bioware’s SWTOR has some rudimentary social networking in their forum site, and hopefully that will carry over to the game design. Metaplace really focuses heavily on this, though they’re not a traditional MMOG. I believe some of the more casual, youth-oriented worlds get this right, and that could partly explain why worlds like Habbo Hotel have so many more subscribers than traditional MMOGs.

They could include something like the Facebook home page, so you can see when a friend gets a new badge or new achievement, or hits max level, or anything else public about the character. Or maybe micro-blogging (think Twitter) so players can put out very short updates of what they’re doing. Export these things as RSS feeds so I don’t have to log into your game or even subscribe, because they will make me want to subscribe and log in to play with my friend.

In other words, we already form tribes. If we can strengthen our tribes, if you give us the tools to connect to our friends and we’ll stay in your world. If you don’t, somebody else will, and we’ll head over there instead.

Update: GamerDNA seems like it’s doing a pretty good attempt at this stuff.

SF books needing movie adaptations

A friend at work sent me this list of The 8 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Which Most Desperately Need Movies (sic).

I’ve never read several of these, principally those that fall into the “fantasy” side more than the “sci-fi” side.

But The Man in the High Castle seems like a natural for Hollywood, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened yet. Snow Crash would likewise come out well.

The Foundation series could possibly do it, though of Asimov’s works the R. Daneel Olivaw mysteries probably lend themselves best to screenplays. We won’t mention the travesty of I, Robot a few years back.

More recently, Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series seems like it could really work as a screenplay, and the author has expressed interest in that happening someday.

I’m wondering what presents more challenges to screenwriters and directors: far-future (like Foundation) or near-future (like Snow Crash)?

EVE Online Skill Training Update 1

EVE Online players frequently cite the skill training system as one of their favorite aspects of the game. No grinding for experience points; rather, a player sets a skill to train, then waits for skill points to accumulate as a function of his character’s existing stats. You can do a few things to increase your stats (Learning skills and implants), but in general after that initial flurry, skill training functions based on real time, as it continues even when the player hasn’t logged into the game in some time, or even remained subscribed, as long as the skill hasn’t completed. You do have to log in to be able to change the skill under training, including changing the planned level, however.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a cue from some other EVE bloggers and talk a little about my current skill planning.

Kudon Astraisx, currently a Minmatar militia pilot, has about 8.4m SP primarily in Gunnery, Spaceship Command, and Electronics. At the moment, he’s working on Electronics Upgrades 5 in order to fly Covert Ops ships. Specifically, I want to be able to fly stealth bombers and, eventually, recon ships. Other than that, I’m still working on support skills (engineering and a bit of mechanics) and some missile skills to increase the damage from the stealth bomber.

Casiella Truza is a cyberpunk-style hacker and researcher with 8.6m SP. She has hacking, archaeology, Minmatar invention, and lots of trade skills. She’s also got T2 Minmatar transport skills. My current plan for her is to get into exploration and build a research-focused starbase. So right now I’ve got Covert Ops 4 going; she already has Cloaking 4 and Astrometrics 4, plus the other scanning skills at level 2. I’ll train them up to 4 once this one is done, as I really want that covert ops cloaking module. In a few weeks, I’ll switch back to research skills for a while. A lot of the gameplay on this character centers around roleplay.

My third alt will remain unnamed for now, but I intend him as a combat escort pilot on Casi’s exploration ventures and maybe eventually running missions for pirate factions. At 2.6m SP, he’s just now becoming viable for that. He’s got Caldari Cruiser 4 and some missile and shield skills, but both of those areas (plus fitting) still need a lot of work. Probably in a week or so, I can get him into a Moa (unlikely, since it wouldn’t kill much) or even a Drake. Long-term, he’ll become a command ship pilot with lots of warfare link skills in case I ever really get into 0.0 warfare or such.

Disillusionment

Getting in the head of a character represents one of the most fascinating bits of roleplaying for me. This particularly occurs in my case when my character feels frustrated. Maybe he can’t accomplish some goal, like finding the object of a quest, or maybe he feels the dull ache of disappointment upon realizing that the world on which he lives turns out to be far less idealistic and far more dystopian than he’d realized.

I’m experiencing that at the moment with EVE Online. One of my characters, Kudon Astraisx, flies for the Minmatar Republic, a collection of tribes who won their freedom decades ago in a revolution against the nearby Amarr Empire and the slavery to which they’d been subjected. I’ve consistently played him as politically naive and too idealistic for the harsh environment in that game.

Now this situation has begun to cause even greater problems, as the government he serves starts to revert from a parliamentary republic to a tribal council. This has caused him to become disillusioned at a particularly difficult moment, as a state of (limited) war has broken out between the two nations, with the Amarr having recently regained substantial portions of the initial gains by Minmatar forces.

I feel his frustration. What does a soldier do in that situation? Normally he fights on, aware that defeat would lead to an even worse situation at home. Maybe after a time he returns to his homeland, having completed his tour. From there, all manner of options open up: political activism, quiet working life, mercenary work, government service, substance abuse and depression… The list doesn’t end. We can spin out archetypical templates ad nauseum.

But the characters in EVE don’t necessarily fit those archetypes so well. They’re transhumans, who don’t die except by sheer accident due to cloning and backups. The ability to fly ships via pods rather than a bridge crew makes them so much more effective than any other traditionally-commanded ship that they can strike out and do whatever they wish. As a sandbox game, players can pursue nearly any interest that grabs their attention.

So I’m not sure where he’ll end up; maybe I’ll focus on another of my characters, or maybe I’ll continue his story in unexpected ways. What I do know is that I love the sort of universe we have in EVE, where ideal choices just don’t exist and your character’s future can play out however you wish.

Roleplayers clearly hate former POWs

Can somebody tell me what role-playing games have to do with the US presidential election? Apparently some Obama supporters have raised an issue about an event McCain claims occurred during his time in a Vietnamese prisoner camp, and the campaign responded:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

I don’t get it. The Boing Boing post on this has lots of great comments; my favorite:

Cyberpunk MMOGs

Given their focus on near-future technology and networking, and the pervasiveness with which the future is infiltrating our lives, cyberpunk-themed MMOGs should in reality rank among the most popular. But they don’t.

Neocron and Matrix Online have both managed to stay online for now, but they never achieved much popularity and have well-publicized business problems. Neocron recently cut their sub fee in half (to $5/month) and eliminated multi-month subscriptions; MxO nearly folded before SOE bought it and never managed to take off due to implementation problems. EVE Online doesn’t really fall into this category, although it retains some cyberpunkish thematic elements.

So the reasons why this genre flounders really escape me. Surely there’s more demand out there for a solid near-future science fiction MMORPG, cyberpunk or not. In fact, there are so few SF MMOGs out there: add Tabula Rasa and Star Wars Galaxies to the list and you’ve basically completed it. Developers have announced several games, but until they’re released or at least reach beta, they don’t count.

Markets abhor vacuums. Someone will fill the niche. Someone will get it right. I want to believe.