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[bvanevery]

SupCom2, Civ V. They're both wonderful games, (partially) ruined by an overly entitled community

Civ IV and V haven't been dumbed down.  They've been streamlined in some areas, and then "dumbed up" or "dumbed sideways" in others.  If the goal is to make the game more manageable, so that real human beings can finish it in sane amounts of time, then curtailing the number of cities is a step in the right direction.  However, one should also reduce the number of buildings and units.

That didn't happen in Civ IV.  Instead, they put in this religion system, which now has all sorts of new buildings per city, and for 6 different religions to boot!  Holy City Chrome Batman do you think they could have given the production baubles a rest?  Oh, and Corporations on top of that, if you didn't want to mess with religions earlier in the game because you're an atheist or whatever.  Also they added a "unit promotions" system straight out of RPGs or "wargame lites" like the Panzer General series.  So now instead of taking 1 mouseclick to get your unit operational, it takes 5.  Now when stacks of units tromp around, you have to deal with 10 different offense + defense + buff + counter-buff permutations.  It means that you usually have to sit around saving up for everything, lest all your elephants die on the points of spearmen spears or whatnot.  Bor-ring!  This is "dumbed sideways" because they took a system that works fine at a certain scale of game, like the relatively small hex Panzer General series, and glommed it into a game which already had far too much extraneous crap.

Civ V got rid of stacks, so now the buff / counter-buff is only between 2 units at a time.  That's sane, and welcomed.  Religions are gone; thank God.  Like Civ IV, you still have "less cities than Civ III," but you've still got a Civ II / III level of different buildings to choose from.  Which has always been too many.  The game is still going to take forever, which is why I played the demo for 83 hours and then deleted it.  I know how this is going to end up, I played enough Civ IV to know that there's nothing new.  I've gone back to Freeciv, which at least offers me the same-old same-old for $0, and I've got it customized for a different play mechanic, namely "popping huts."

Oh, and Civ V now adds city-states, increasing complexity instead of decreasing it.  They can't help themselves.  They can only churn the complexity of the game in sideways directions, they really can't improve it.

[s0]

You really like talking about Civ, do you? 

[bvanevery]

You really like talking about Civ, do you? 

WTF?  Someone else brings it up, you talk about it, I offer my concrete insights having just completed the demo, and you have a problem with that?  Don't talk about Civ if you don't want people to talk about Civ.

[s0]

I don't have any problem with it, it's just that you seem to talk about Civ games a disproportionate amount of time and I was acknowledging that. It was supposed to be lighthearted and not entirely serious. Don't take everything as a personal insult.

[tsameti]

I don't believe I want to get into what is or isn't 'ruined'. That discussion can become personal very quickly, and is sometimes very subjective.

There's a very vocal group of gamers that seek out and enjoy complexity. They love it, and I actually count myself in that group most of the time. But it's not a huge group. The larger audience appreciates streamlining. A smart developer with an established successful product and a desire to make a living and pay the bills may try to reach out to that audience. They might alternatively strive to reduce production costs and then specialize in order to more deeply satisfy their hardcore base. The tough thing we need to accept is that the gaming community can't survive if we expect titles to be capable of reaching both groups at the same time.

Somebody's going to have to figure out how to finance this stuff if we expect to see more of it. The answer's probably going to be that art/hardcore devs are going to have to charge more per unit entertainment than mainstream titles.

Or they will have to figure out how to lower production costs while still offering an aesthetically decent product, much as "film noir" once did.

Yup! I imagine it will have to be a combination of the two. It's getting easier to produce games at low cost using new technologies, but it's still an extremely technical endeavor. I probably ought to recognize there are a few people (many of which are present on this board) who are experimenting with very cool game-exclusive literary devices with minimalist tech.

So we're making a lot of progress on the small-production art-house end of the perspective. It's the mid-size production, ~ 20-40 person team that we're feeling the absence of.

Paying money is never fun, but I don't understand why people are outraged we have to pay $60 bucks for a title. Where can you honestly go these days where you can buy entertainment at the rate of $5/hr?

The problem here is the "cultural depth" category competes directly with films and books.
...
I do know that people pay a lot of money for live theater tickets.  Maybe that's a way to position IF.

Very true, sometimes the market doesn't recognize that the production cost for each layer of storytelling dimension (visual, audio, written, haptic, and the game holy grail of interactivity) should be recognized in the price of the final product. But yea, I think that we can learn a lot from the patronage and support of live theatre. Part of that is creating a community and getting people personally invested in your work.

We've grown up! There are a large number of older gamers out there.

Which on the positive side, means many of them have a fair amount of discretionary income.

:D Why pay two hundred bucks for that painting of french wine bottles when you can buy 'Portraits of Grief', a compelling interactive story of a couples therapist coming to terms with the death of his Mother while simultaneously struggling to reach the most challenging patients of his career in series of abstractly surreal dream sequences?
God I want that game.

[OneMoreGo]

I'm not sure I notice less depth, a bit less risk taking in game ideas. Mainstream titles particularly are easier, definately. Most games I play on console are stupidly easy, you can pick up a game you've never played and never die or lose any progress on the default difficulty setting.

I think deep, well thought out, and complex are all orthogonal concerns.  The deepest game will give you only atoms but you can build anything you like with them.  The most complex game might give you least actual depth since your freedom is more limited. 

[Rumrusher]

I don't believe I want to get into what is or isn't 'ruined'. That discussion can become personal very quickly, and is sometimes very subjective.

There's a very vocal group of gamers that seek out and enjoy complexity. They love it, and I actually count myself in that group most of the time. But it's not a huge group. The larger audience appreciates streamlining. A smart developer with an established successful product and a desire to make a living and pay the bills may try to reach out to that audience. They might alternatively strive to reduce production costs and then specialize in order to more deeply satisfy their hardcore base. The tough thing we need to accept is that the gaming community can't survive if we expect titles to be capable of reaching both groups at the same time.

Somebody's going to have to figure out how to finance this stuff if we expect to see more of it. The answer's probably going to be that art/hardcore devs are going to have to charge more per unit entertainment than mainstream titles.

Or they will have to figure out how to lower production costs while still offering an aesthetically decent product, much as "film noir" once did.

Yup! I imagine it will have to be a combination of the two. It's getting easier to produce games at low cost using new technologies, but it's still an extremely technical endeavor. I probably ought to recognize there are a few people (many of which are present on this board) who are experimenting with very cool game-exclusive literary devices with minimalist tech.

So we're making a lot of progress on the small-production art-house end of the perspective. It's the mid-size production, ~ 20-40 person team that we're feeling the absence of.

Paying money is never fun, but I don't understand why people are outraged we have to pay $60 bucks for a title. Where can you honestly go these days where you can buy entertainment at the rate of $5/hr?

The problem here is the "cultural depth" category competes directly with films and books.
...
I do know that people pay a lot of money for live theater tickets.  Maybe that's a way to position IF.

Very true, sometimes the market doesn't recognize that the production cost for each layer of storytelling dimension (visual, audio, written, haptic, and the game holy grail of interactivity) should be recognized in the price of the final product. But yea, I think that we can learn a lot from the patronage and support of live theatre. Part of that is creating a community and getting people personally invested in your work.

We've grown up! There are a large number of older gamers out there.

Which on the positive side, means many of them have a fair amount of discretionary income.

:D Why pay two hundred bucks for that painting of french wine bottles when you can buy 'Portraits of Grief', a compelling interactive story of a couples therapist coming to terms with the death of his Mother while simultaneously struggling to reach the most challenging patients of his career in series of abstractly surreal dream sequences?
God I want that game.

I find it that with wine bottles you can take a large plastic sheet and a sharpie marker and doodle all over the painting with out fear the artist will Foam in the mouth and send lawyers after you for Derailing his piece... that way one could say they are making Non-art. Wait a Non art/non game compo would be sweet, take a fellow art/non game and either modify it to either show a light hearted mockery of the morals the creator was going for or warp it to something else that has nothing to do with what the original game was about. I'm going to cross post this idea to the compo board!

[gimymblert]

I have a pet theory that the game medium is so emotionally abstracted that the only way to bring an emotional jolt to the proceedings is to constantly immerse the player in life-or-death situations. Game designers need to make a story feel urgent without that.

That's pretty much one of the problem. But phoenix wright and trauma center was pretty well receive and acheive that. I hope we start moving in this direction more often. Mass effect and the kind try to get into that, let see if they get can rid of fighting. But I think the solution will came from indie, obscure or casual game.

Galatea is the closest to a procedural storytelling but you certainly not do much things, it's more akin to a non linear exploration like hypertext.

Hm, what do you mean "not do much things"? There are around 70 patterns each closing with unique ending. And certainly if you added art, music and other polish on top of it, you'd get something that is less of a hypertext adventure.

The number of ending does not count, you don't take much action beside opening new area. It's like a hypertext in the sense you just follow a stream of branch with occasional parralel line. The polishness does not count.

A true procedural story would create the content on the basis of action, not only parsing and generting text, but whole situation.

I think that one solution is to approach stories like AI, at least a finite state machine that operate on a set of variable that set the context. Each state would be a "chapiter" of the story. It's story as a behavior rather than story as a line (branched, parralel or whatever). It would be the moment to moment response that would create the story.

I would love to do that right, but right now I must work on a certain context that limit my freedom

[mirosurabu]

I remember reading Emily's blog and if I remember correctly Galatea is designed as a directed NPC/AI. I think there is a bit of fuzziness in there and as such it's not completely streamlined. Endings are obviously designed in advance, but patterns are not clearly planned.

[gimymblert]

Oh! right then!

[bento_smile]

:D Why pay two hundred bucks for that painting of french wine bottles when you can buy 'Portraits of Grief', a compelling interactive story of a couples therapist coming to terms with the death of his Mother while simultaneously struggling to reach the most challenging patients of his career in series of abstractly surreal dream sequences?
God I want that game.

Make it happen! 

[tsameti]

Lol. I think your smiley needs to be gripping a few less dollar bills in reference to that idea.

[simono]

Very interesting thread.

But I'm wondering if we're talking about the same thing - when a lot of posts talk about "dumbed down", "complexity", "simplified", ... isn't this more about how much and how well the game explains the rules and the general strategy versus how much a game lets you explore those rules by yourself!?

For example, Chess is a good game, I think we agree. But in a sense chess is a dumbed down game, very simple - takes 15min - to pickup. Very little rules and you are being told all the rules beforehand. On the other hand something like D&D is complex in the sense that there is a lot to learn, a lot to explore and *figure out by yourself*. You won't have all the rules memorized before playing your first game of D&D.

But which game is more hardcore, less casual? chess or d&d?

In conclusion - I think a lot of what we called "dumbed down" is actually a friendlier experience for new users of the game because they wouldn't know what to do at the beginning. But the same experience might be perceived as too easy by hardcore gamers, because the *want* to figure out things by themselves - for them that is part of the game. And if you take away the exploring, discovering of the rules they feel the game got dumbed down; although the game really is the same it's just that the rules are now more explicit.

[bvanevery]

For example, Chess is a good game, I think we agree. But in a sense chess is a dumbed down game, very simple - takes 15min - to pickup.

That's an exaggeration.  If it really only took you a literal 15 minutes to understand and play your 1st chess game in so-so fashion, then you're smarter than 90% of the people on the planet.  It's not a crime to be born with a brain capable of more spatial / mathematical / analytical operations per second than most people, but it is a skewing factor you should take into account when analyzing the braininess or dumbness of a game.

I learned chess when I was 6 or 7 I think.  The babysitter taught me one day.  It took me an hour and of course I didn't play particularly well.  I was playing D&D at 8.  At 10 our school took a few of us to the Golden Gate Junior Chess Association.  I didn't think of myself as an amazing player, but I actually beat a lot of people and got to Table #1.  There, the 3 other people totally creamed me, because they had formal training in chess strategy and I didn't.

In college, I got pretty decent at chess by playing against the Sargon II AI on the Macintosh.  It played a boring but effective game of attrition, and it taught me the specific value of specific squares.  Such a game would offend Marcel Duchamp, who felt it was more important to play an artistic game than simply to win.

In later life, I played against people in Seattle coffee houses who "took chess really seriously."  I didn't always win but I always gave the super-maniacs a really hard fight.  Chess wasn't interesting enough to me to go study all those books and openings and moves.  It was clear that I could, if I wanted to be a better chess player, but I didn't care to.  I played chess like a general on a battlefield, by the seat of my pants.  I generally didn't think more than 3 moves ahead.  That was fine for me.  It was enough to beat a lot of really good chess players, if not the best chess players.

Very little rules and you are being told all the rules beforehand. On the other hand something like D&D is complex in the sense that there is a lot to learn, a lot to explore and *figure out by yourself*. You won't have all the rules memorized before playing your first game of D&D.

And yet all of the D&D rules can be thrown out in favor of pure freeform no-rules RPG.  And yet, with such stripped down rules about player and game interaction, i.e. "just write," rules of more effective narrative do emerge.

But which game is more hardcore, less casual? chess or d&d?

In conclusion - I think a lot of what we called "dumbed down" is actually a friendlier experience for new users of the game because they wouldn't know what to do at the beginning. But the same experience might be perceived as too easy by hardcore gamers, because the *want* to figure out things by themselves - for them that is part of the game. And if you take away the exploring, discovering of the rules they feel the game got dumbed down; although the game really is the same it's just that the rules are now more explicit.

Yes the initial learning curve is one of the ways of looking at "dumbed down."  One could also look at the entire curve though.  Does the game reduce to some kind of pointlessness, where there's really only 1 strategy that dominates the game?

[RCIX]

For example, Chess is a good game, I think we agree. But in a sense chess is a dumbed down game, very simple - takes 15min - to pickup.

That's an exaggeration.  If it really only took you a literal 15 minutes to understand and play your 1st chess game in so-so fashion, then you're smarter than 90% of the people on the planet.  It's not a crime to be born with a brain capable of more spatial / mathematical / analytical operations per second than most people, but it is a skewing factor you should take into account when analyzing the braininess or dumbness of a game.

Calm down he just meant roughly 15 minutes or so, just as an example of how long it might take a gifted person to learn.

But which game is more hardcore, less casual? chess or d&d?

In conclusion - I think a lot of what we called "dumbed down" is actually a friendlier experience for new users of the game because they wouldn't know what to do at the beginning. But the same experience might be perceived as too easy by hardcore gamers, because the *want* to figure out things by themselves - for them that is part of the game. And if you take away the exploring, discovering of the rules they feel the game got dumbed down; although the game really is the same it's just that the rules are now more explicit.

Yes the initial learning curve is one of the ways of looking at "dumbed down."  One could also look at the entire curve though.  Does the game reduce to some kind of pointlessness, where there's really only 1 strategy that dominates the game?

Well, i wouldn't call that dumbed down, i'd just say not very deep. And perhaps that's what more hardcore players mean when they say that; they think it's not a very deep game. Whether those accusations (for lack of a better word) are correct depend on the specific game and how much time they spent learning it

[bvanevery]

Calm down he just meant roughly 15 minutes or so, just as an example of how long it might take a gifted person to learn.

I'm calm; I'm making a point about different people's ability to grasp "depth."  Tic tac toe seems pretty engaging to 5 year olds, after all.  I talked about my life experience of chess because it has meant different things to me at different points in my life.  None of those points has ever included "formal chess study," which is exactly what chess means to a large class of chess players out there.  Possibly the majority: are you really a chess player if you don't study opening books and so forth?  Yet I play chess decently against many of them; go figure.  One of the problems with these discussions, is that if we can't establish objective metrics for "depth," it disappears into the realm of the subjective pretty quickly.  That in turn makes some people upset.

But which game is more hardcore, less casual? chess or d&d?

Historically that has changed also.  AD&D went through a fad phase in the early 1980s when literally everybody was playing it.  Everybody in 6th grade, even normal girls.  That was my memory of it.  People weren't geeks for doing it.  Then some people got killed for real in some caves underneath MIT, and all the media hoopla about violence and Satanism got started.  Then the fad shrunk back down to its core audience, the socially less skilled creative escapist nerds that played the game before, and have played the game ever since.  My dorm in college had a big contingent of such people.  Probably because the dorm was a Tudor castle, had a real armorer working in the basement, and the Society for Creative Anachronism practiced on the front lawn every Sunday afternoon.  We called the D&D players "CLRries," which was short for "Central Living Room," the place where they gathered to play D&D.  The joke was that there were only 3 permissible topics of conversation at the dorm's dinner tables: sex, computers, and D&D.

BTW when I bring up some of these details of my own life, it's so you can compare them to your own lives and see if there's any "aha" of cultural pattern.  You ever known your own "CLRries?"  What does that say about the casualness or hardcoreness of D&D?

How would you objectively measure the depth of chess?  or D&D?  Can their depths be meaningfully compared?

[RCIX]

One of the problems with these discussions, is that if we can't establish objective metrics for "depth," it disappears into the realm of the subjective pretty quickly.  That in turn makes some people upset.
<snip>
How would you objectively measure the depth of chess?  or D&D?  Can their depths be meaningfully compared?

Well, that gets back to my idea of repeatedly analyzing rulesets to find interactions that make new rules until you can't do it anymore, which i imagine would be really hard to do with something like D&D.

[bvanevery]

Well, that gets back to my idea of repeatedly analyzing rulesets to find interactions that make new rules until you can't do it anymore, which i imagine would be really hard to do with something like D&D.

There's almost enough material in the Nth order game to start such an analysis.  If there isn't, there soon will be.  Uh, unless I get banned and no one else shows up to write, of course.

One metric I already observe, is how much "meta tension" builds up until the participants feel a need to say something about the direction of the game.  I started to make a separate thread about the evolution of the game yesterday, as some things were bugging me about it, but I held off in order to see what would evolve without my interference.  I don't think it's coincidental that shortly thereafter, you added a new rule about "making it more like writing."  Although we may or may not share the same views on what's going on, it's clear that we both realized that the system was reaching some kind of point of strain that was going to require some kind of "director's cue."  Games do exist about implicit unspoken contracts, for example Contract Bridge, but I'll hazard a guess that implicit contracts can only get a group of players so far.  At some point they have to talk explicitly about what they want from the game.