Game Designer Mode: On. Lightbulb: On. Neon Sign inside lightbulb: Strangely amusing.

Unlike my previous posts in this style, this one is about a simple mechanical idea. Most likely, I’ll add some meaning behind the mechanics, but for now this is just an abstract game idea that I’ll probably end up actually using in a game in a month or two (I’m currently swamped (SWAMPED I tell you!) with a current project that doesn’t have anything to do with game design and everything to do with learning 4 different coding languages, each with their own tools and work environments (If you are curious, the languages are Action Script 3, C++, C#, javascript and php (… it seems I have lost the ability to count thanks to all this learning… (Still, totally worth it))))).

Anyway, for the sake of being simplistic, imagine a traditional 16bit RPG. Now imagine having the monster on the map instead of being random encounters. Then imagine that everything falls inside a fixed grid like any other tactics game. Now let’s say that your protagonist is accompanied by his or her party. The whole party being visible at all times and following the protagonist in a conga line style.

Are you still with me? Good. Or bad, I really don’t know your answer, I’m just guessing here.

The player will be able to control two things in total: the leader and his or her attacks. That’s it. The rest of the party will have up to three different reactions on each step the leader makes. So, let’s say the leader walks three spaces and makes the cleric move two spaces in consequence. Each of the two times the cleric moved he cured every other party member in a radius of 2 squares with a light cure spell. Everybody else either used items, equiped other weapons/armor or just plain did nothing because nobody was either in danger or in a position to attack.

Time in this World would only flow for each party member only when said member is walking. For instance, the flying arrows the archer shot will stop in the middle of the air if the archer stops walking.

Some very interesting things in this world could then revolve around limiting or liberating space around other entities, be them enemies or even NPCs. The first example that comes to mind is blocking the shopkeeper’s path will let the player loot the place without him going nuts.

I don’t know, there’s something particularly amusing about a world where nobody can stand still, even during conversations. Mmmhhh, maybe I could fade out the text-box as the NPC gets away from the leader.

Alright, I wasn’t sure at first, but now I’ve convinced myself: I’m definitely going to implement this idea.

Image technically stolen from this here blog I found through something totally other than google images.

Hey ladies and gentlemen, guess what? Ubisoft recently announced something very very stupid interesting: A new propietary service that will force you grant you the privilege of only being able to play your Ubisoft games while being connected to the internet. It will also upload all your save files to their servers automatically to hoard as much personal data as they can make you happy, because carrying a save file around in a flash drive is such a painful process and it occurs with such frequency that one wonders why the hell are they doing this they didn’t think of this before.

In fact, this DRM system has so many advantages I can only describe a few of them right now without taxing my brain:

• No need to save your savefiles in a flash drive before going to your aunt’s house.
• No need to have the actual disc in the drive. That’s right, no more cd-checks!
• You can install your game in as many computers as you’d like!
• You’ll not be able to play your game if you don’t have acess to the internet.
• If your internet connection dies on you while playing, the game will pause, and then if connection isn’t reestablished, it will let you continue playing your game.
• But you won’t be able to save in that case (probably).
• If the servers are sent to the graveyard, then Ubisoft will kindly issue a patch to let you play without authentication!
• You won’t be able to resell your game (That is, until the servers are down and the patch is issued… but at that point, how much do you think Gamestop or the equivalent is going to give you for that game? A dollar? 50 cents?)
• Oh, and don’t forget that it’s not just you, Ubisoft might have internet problems too! A lot of MMOs have bandwidth problems at first until they eventually solve them (or go bankrupt, whatever comes first), what makes you think Ubisoft will have everything working perfectly at launch day?
• Mmmhhh, yeah. There’s one more thing: You’ll be buying a service instead of a product, and that service is going to stay as a service until a few years later when they release the patch that will turn it into a product. That is, if they don’t go bankruupt before that happens. So, you’ll be safe as long as Ubisoft stays alive and is kind enough to let you play your game without their supervision.

The bottom line is, why is Ubisoft doing this stupid, stupid, stupid move? It can’t be for piracy, they aren’t that idiotic. Mmmmhhhh, let’s think for a second, what is the second most mentioned “problem” of the industry at hand? Piracy is number one, so that’s not it…

Oh! right! The second hand market! How could I forget about that? Yes, that’s what this is about: Ubisoft doesn’t have the balls to go fully digital just yet, so they want to squeeze more profit out of their “hardcore” games by not letting Gamestop and other companies sell their games used! That’s just brilliant incredibly stupid!

So, in essence, they grabbed the idea of Steam, deleted almost all of the good ideas it has in it and then proceeded to claim it’s how they are going to distribute their games now. Because that’s what’s going to increase your profits: Piss off your customers, eliminate a section of your audience (how many people don’t have reliable internet connection at all times? 10% of your audience? 20? 30?) and then tell them it’s for their own good.

I think I promised not ot talk about these topics again on this blog, but when something this incredibly stupid gets announced… I just loose it.

Side-note: What if they announce Beyond Good & Evil 2 for 2010? I mean, it’s not likely, but if it does come out this year and if Ubisoft doesn’t back down from this horrible idea, then  BG&E2 will come out with this garbage attached to it *shudder*

You’ll have to forgive me for the amount of cited text in this post. The only excuse I have is “Dammit, Corvus is on to something very interesting here and I need to steal it”. Well, not steal steal, I’m just going to use this idea in my future posts and the way I design games.

Anyway, a couple of days ago Corvus published two posts that were trying to come up with a broader and more comprehensive definition of what we previously viewed as “cutscenes”, since most discussions about them never went anywhere. They almost always devolved into addressing the definition of the word, for example, if being rendered in real-time or being pre-rendered actually mattered. (If you ask me, it matters in a very very tiny way:  because there’s less of a visual separation between actual gameplay and the cutscene itself. Like I said: Tiny.)

In those two posts, Corvus came up with a broader term to encompass all of the instances where the designer takes a portion of the control away from the player, but with one exception:

Developer Moment: Any time the player’s available verbs are restricted beyond what can be attributed to a clear narrative device.

Furthermore, he defined three categories of Developer Moments:

Exposition: These DMs give the player insight into the world. They establish history, set up scenes, and show character moments that can’t be easily revealed through gameplay. Beyond Good & Evil made great use of Exposition DMs. When people defend cut scenes, they most often reference this classification of DMs. They are also the easiest to get right and probably the hardest to implement as actual gameplay.

Foreshadowing: These DMs are the other half of the narrative coin. Instead of showing what is, or what has been, they harbinger what is to come. Yesterday I referenced Tombraider’s camera swoops that show you where you need to go in a level. That’s a use of Foreshadowing DMs. In Castle Crashers there’s a level where you can’t advance until you’ve watched an animal shit itself to death in fear of something. Since you can normally advance after dispatching all the enemies on a screen, I consider that a Foreshadowing DM as well.

Puppeteering: These DMs involve ensuring the player behaves in a manner consistent with the developers’ expectations. Puppeteering DMs typically involve showing the player’s character performing actions that could normally be performed by the player. For example: moving the player’s avatar to a specific point in a room to keep them from colliding with an incoming boss, which happened Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain, or switching to a cut scene to show them walking them through a door they’ve just opened, as happened in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

To me, a Developer Moment is a concept that begs to be used in the analysis of game design, as opposed to the concept of “Cutscene”. Though I have to admit that it took me a few days to start thinking about game design in this way.

You know, for the last two years I’ve seen people discuss how Valve handles their Developer Moments in Half-Life. Some don’t like them because they can’t be skipped like a normal cutscene, but most of us love them for letting the player free at all times, even if “free” only means having control over the character within a limited space with only one way of progressing through the area. The thing is, with Corvus’ definition of Developer Moment stuck in my head, now I see more clearly why Valve’s philosophy struck a chord with so many people: They refuse to treat the player like a puppet.

And that’s a design philosophy I can get behind.

You'll be amazed* why this image is related to this post.

While visiting Destructoid for the latest Rev Rant, I started reading the comments and something caught my attention. When people started comparing the difficulty of a game like Demon’s Souls with a game like Spelunky, something just clicked and… well, this post is the result. Both games continuously present the player with impossible challenge after impossible challenge, but they both approach the issue of difficulty in very different and interesting ways.

And the major mechanic that drives this difference between the two approaches is the randomizing of levels in Spelunky and the predictability of the enemies and environments in Demon’s Souls. To lay it out plain and simple,while  Spelunky is a game of skill and chance, Demon’s Souls is a game of skill and memorization. Of course there’s more to them than that, but that’s the main difference between the two.

Alright, now that we have the big picture, let’s start picking these games apart. First, let’s go with Demon’s Souls shall we?

————-

Like I already said, Demon’s Souls demands constant memorization from the player. Imagine, if you will, a giant never-ending wall. That’s the difficulty “curve”. Well, now imagine that you try to scale it, but the first part you grab falls off. You get back up, dust off your left shoulder and grab another piece of the wall… and it falls off. Repeat this process 5 to 50 times until you finally discovered some minuscule part of the wall that doesn’t actually fall off immediately when grabbed. Congratulations! You’ve learned how to take your first step through the game! Except that 3 hours later you discover that said part of the wall was a dead end and you now need to start off from square one. You see, that part you discovered was meant to be discovered by players with a character well above  level 50… sorry.

But the thing is, the wall doesn’t have that many other places where you can try to scale again. Hell, even if only of them turns out to be the right way to go, it wouldn’t take that much time to figure out.

Basically, the game gradually got easier. It just took the player a really long time, but progress was achieved through trial and error. Or, to put it in other words: this game is possible to beat, it takes a hell of a lot of patience and time, but it’s possible.

Once the player finishes to scale the wall, it won’t look like a wall at all to him anymore. It will resemble something more aching to twisty road filled with pitfalls and hazards that can be avoided with the right knowledge.

——-

On the other hand, we have Spelunky. Returning to that wall metaphor, let’s say that this time the wall isn’t nigh infinite but only appears to be so at first. In addition, it was built with differently colored bricks, each one representing a challenge or a reward. While climbing, the player won’t be able to see more than 10 bricks ahead or behind him.

Imagine it’s you climbing that wall. The red bricks are quite possibly harmful, so you probably shouldn’t touch those… but as an experiment you grab that red brick anyway. And it burns your hand. Yeah, that wasn’t very intelligent of you, but at least now you are sure you need to avoid those bricks. Lesson learned! Now off to the next brick. Mmmmhhh, let’s grab that gold one. Yep, that increases your treasure score. This all seems intuitive enough. Let’s try to grab the green one then! … okay that wasn’t a good idea: A giant spider is now chasing you. While trying to avoid it, you grab another red brick and then plummet to the floor.

Now that I think about it, there's a very interesting similarity between Minesweeper and Spelunky

A sign with the following text appears right next to the base of the wall: Best Score: 1 point. Oh well, as a first time experience it wasn’t that bad. In Demon’s Souls you had to spend hours upon hours to scale that much of the wall, you think to yourself with a distorted sense of pride clearly showing on your face. But as you look up, you realize that now the wall has changed. The bricks are now all organized in a very different way. In fact, now you can see other colored bricks that you didn’t see before.

And that’s just a taste of what’s to come. Whenever you fall, the wall rebuilds itself to provide you with a fresh new challenge. The first few hours are going to be the most fun you’ll have with the game, since you’ll be experimenting and deducing patterns all over the place. It’s fun, it’s addictive and incredibly hard. But then, when you’ve played it for far too many hours, you start to get bored of it. Sure, every single time the wall is constructed in a different way, but there’s no more experimentation to be done, you’ve already figured out everything and now it’s just a matter of skill and luck to get through this whole thing.

Why luck? Well, when you’ve played Spelunky enough times, you start to realize that when you fail, it may not actually be your fault entirely. Sure, you were the one that stepped into the tomb and woke up the giant scorpion, but you were already running from a caveman in the first place because the exit was placed in such a way that you didn’t have any option but to drop down, run from the caveman and get eaten by the scorpion. Nobody in their right mind would have ever designed a level in such an obviously broken but functional way. Nobody but a procedural algorithm that is (see image above).

——–

Now, I recognize that this is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s just so much more to these games than the basic mechanics I’ve described throughout this post. For example, you do eventually achieve progress in Spelunky by way of shortcut tunnels, which immensely increased my enjoyment of that game, but at the end of the day, it didn’t change it’s fundamental nature. And as for Demon’s Souls, there’s a very distinct theme behind it: that of griefing and cooperation between players through indirect online interaction. It’s because of that theme that it acquired such a nasty and vengeful game design, since players are meant to leave notes to make the challenges easier for each other. Like a sort of collective intelligence. The problem is, not everybody wants other people to have it easier that themselves. If they had to suffer through this and that, then everybody else better suffer equally if they want to achieve the same goal**

I don’t know if Demon’s Souls could qualify as a social experiment, but if the goal was to eventually achieve a normal difficulty by letting the players leave notes to each other… then apparently it failed at that, though it still is an interesting game to analyze.

Second image serendipitously obtained from Ascii Dreams.

* Not really.

**You kids today have it easier! When I was your age I had to walk through 60 miles of snow and 50 of desert just to go to the bathroom! Get off my lawn!

There’s something that has been bugging me about The Dragon Speech and only today have I finally succeeded in putting my finger on it. Other people, like Corvus, have talked about the subject extensively, but I haven’t seen anyone address the possible limits that we designers have in our communication with the player.

Since videogames can talk back to the player, we could say that there’s a communication between the game itself (or even the designer) and the player. That’s all fine and dandy, but how limited is this communication? Well, basically this is what bugged me about the Dragon Speech when Chris more or less equates a conversation between two people with playing a videogame.

It isn’t that simple, mainly since two people talking implies a back and forth of ideas, of reactions, but a game cannot afford to do this or else it risks spreading itself too thin. And even then, we don’t exactly have the sufficiently intelligent AI for tackling such a feat with any degree of success (though a failed attempt, Façade was a very good first step in that direction).

What I’m talking about here is that any given game focuses in a few topics and never strays away from them at any given point, contrary to what happens in normal conversation where a cacophony of ideas, anecdotes and chit chat takes place.

There’s a strange dichotomy between the agent of chaos that is the player and the focused experience that the game tries to be. Sure, some designs are not linear, sure some games don’t even have an express objective, but the games are always in control of the topics beings discussed, even if their express goal when designed was to grant the player the most freedom possible.

So, the conversation that takes place when gaming is inherently limited to what the designer wants to talk about, or rather, what she wants to say. Furthermore, the game can only react to the actions it was programmed for, otherwise if the player does something unexpected he will always get an inappropriate reaction. The back and forth of the conversation is broken.

And I’m kind of wondering: Is this unavoidable? The knee-jerk response is to say that sooner or later, the player will always find an inappropriate reaction, but I’m not too sure of that myself. I mean, if the game was polished enough, short enough and designed well enough, then maybe, just maybe, the conversation of play won’t be broken for a small amount of people.

Then again, one could argue that purely ludic games like Super Mario Bros. have already accomplished that on a much, much smaller scale by simply having not that much to say but polishing that message to a shine. Problem is, I don’t like that approach since it implies that dealing with simple messages is the only choice we have as designers.

Mmmhhh, then there’s Passage, which communicates it’s message directly through mechanics and opens the communication only through interpretation. Only by deciphering what every mechanic means can the player understand what the game is “talking” about. The major disadvantage to this approach is that the inmediate communication is not very engaging and might even alienate some people. What do you exactly do in Passage? Well, you walk. And open chests. And maybe get a wife. And die. And that’s it, it just doesn’t sound very good at face value and so, it’s audience will be limited to those people who just “get it” and looked past the seemingly boring actions the game was apparently about.

Image silently pickpocketed from here.

Imagine a sandbox RPG game. Yes, I know, how original!

Alright, now, let’s say that the protagonist starts in a normal town, she gets to know everybody, she helps everybody, everybody helps her, etc, etc. Basically, the player gets to know this bunch of characters and gets to interact with each them in a mechanically meaningful way, for example:

• Do favors for the shopkeeper and he’ll let you buy 3 things at a 50% discount.
• Help the blacksmith with his health problem and he’ll let you customize a piece of metal.
• Adopt the town’s dog and feed him. Eventually he’ll get healthier and start playing with you.

Those are not exactly very good or elaborated examples, I know, but they are not the point of this post, so let’s move on.

Why would we want the player attached to these characters? Oh boy,I’m glad you asked, because, you know… I don’t know for sure. I mean, pardon the phrase, but we have the player by the genitals here, we have them caring about these characters and it’s freaking hard not to perform a low blow. The player likes this guy? KILL HIM, that will make him/her feel something!

It’s ham-fisted, it’s predictable and I can’t avoid it. I keep coming up with these ideas that try to play with the player’s heartstrings as if they were a guitar, the problem is all I can think about is yanking at the strings and banging them randomly instead of, you know, playing music. (I should really start to, perhaps, possibly, read something other than blogposts all day, or at least read blogposts about literature, that should be a good compromise, don’t you think? … Err… where was I? Oh, right, in the middle of a parenthesis).

Anyway:

The idea so far is about a sandbox RPG game kind of like Fallout but with an initial phase where the player gets to know and play with a bunch of characters. Then, the big bad guy kills almost everyone, let’s say, a 95% of the population, where, of course, the player’s characters finds herself in.

Now, hopefully, the players really hate this guy. That was our goal after all.

Good, then, let’s say that this one guy that ruined everything has many, many friends all over the country, and hopefully one of them knows the whereabouts of this guy. That’s where the game opens and becomes a game not too dissimilar to Fallout. The player will find random people in need of random things, most of them interconnected with each other. This time around, the battles are entirely optional and become just one of the many things available to the player.

Again, so far, so pedestrian. But here is the core of this whole idea and post: The player can find the guy at any point in time, be it by luck, by finding those NPCs that really know where he is, by reading a strategy guide, by having played the game before, etc. It doesn’t matter how. Once the player does find him then he’s faced with a … well, I don’t know if I should qualify it as a “difficult” decision, but I’ll at least say that it might be interesting to a section of those who play this game.

The so called decision is as follows: You, the player, could just kill him, but loose all the motivation to explore the country (for example, now your dialog options are only centered around chit-chat instead of asking for the whereabouts of the big bad guy, effectively loosing whole side-quests in the process) … or you could just let him go and pretend to keep looking for him since the chase has become your raison d’être.

I personally find this decision interesting, given that what’s going on in the player’s mind is exactly what is going in the protagonist’s mind: Do I exact my revenge here now and be done with it? Or do I want to keep looking for him, even if I know that revenge is no longer my motivation for my journey?

Any thoughts? This idea went through my mind an hour ago, so please, forgive me if I wasn’t exactly clear or appeared to be rambling a bit too much. I used to write these ideas down in a piece of paper in the past but I find that trying to articulate them in the form of a blog post helps me think more clearly about them and as a bonus I get to update my blog with something, so hey, everybody wins!

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I find that talking about past videogames and the reasoning behind the decisions made during the development of them, both helps me understand them more and at the same time demystified the whole process of game development.

So that’s what I’ll try to achieve with these post-mortems.

In the past year or so I’ve started quite a few projects and finished only two of them (the first one and the last one, conveniently enough). Nevertheless, I’ve learned something new out of every single one of them, so I wouldn’t even dream to label any one of these projects as a waste of time, in fact, quite the contrary: Each one served as an experiment in different ways to make games. Some of them failed, some of them succeeded and all of them were made with Game Maker.

I’ve already started to try out new tools for game making, so I thought appropriate to start a series of postmortems now that I had such a big change in the way I’m making games.

Also, this post is just an introduction to the series of post-mortems since explaining all of this in the first post of the series would have only ammounted to unnnecessary commentary. This way, I get to ramble on and on for a few paragraphs without having to worry about the word count. Plus, I have two very big exams in a few days so I don’t exactly have the time to give this series the polish it deserves.

In my not so humble opinion, THIS is how every game that takes itself seriously should implement achievements/trophies, if at all.

I don’t have a PS3 nor a 360, but I can safely say that I particularly hate how every single game notifies you that you’ve just won an achievement/trophy: A ding sound, and a congratulatory message that can potentially obstruct crucial parts of the screen at just the worst possible time. But it’s not just that. They irk me to no end because they are designed to please for no reason whatsoever: Hey! I just jumped around the plaza 50 times and got a congratulatory message! Woot! Now I’ll waste 3 hours trying to fall from a 50 foot drop onto a glass of water conveniently placed for such a stunt.

But that’s being unfair. I mean, it’s not Sony’s or Microsoft’s fault that some developers reward the most uninteresting activities or the most pedestrian accomplishments (I’m so awesome I just won 5 atomic tangerine points for playing for more than 10 minutes!). However, they DO force developers to implement this system, and that’s kind of understandable if you think about the problem from a business point of view, but as a game designer I can’t stop squirming at the idea of having to implement this system for all my games if I were to work with these consoles.

I’m making a game about a man slowly realising he’s no longer young, please tell me, where should I put achievements? Of course, I can think of a few places where Sony and Microsoft can shove these achievements, but that’s besides the point.

Now, since *most* games are actually loud and/or silly, having a congratulatory message pop up at any point in time doesn’t feel out-of-place for the most part. That’s fine, and that’s why you don’t see too many people complaining about how “this achievement ruined the moment for me” or something along those lines.

But what if we have serious games? Games that aren’t about just having fun. What if Passage had achievements that popped up the more loot you gathered and the more distance you travelled? It would most definitely ruin the feel of the game, or at the very least, change it substantially.

Imagine if every game flashed THIS thing across the screen every time the player made a mistake, all because the great big companies wasted some good money on the copyright, and dammit, they may as well milk it for all it's worth.

While we are at it, why don’t we force them lazy game designers to add a standardized system of levels and experience to every single game ever released? You know, because market research has proven it to be a hit with the cool kids of today. Of course, we couldn’t just implement this system and not force everybody to implement it, otherwise nobody would! And we would have wasted our precious time developing the system! Why would we implement it in the first place if nobody’s going to use it? That’s crazy talk!

Seriously though, that’s what they are doing, both Microsoft and Sony with forcing achievements down developers throats: They are basically dictating how game designers should do their job.

And I don’t like that.

The following post is sort of a reply to this post written by Sirlin. Although, on second thought, I’d say it’s more of an analysis on some of the topics he addresses. Please go ahead and read it all before continuing here. I mean it.

Alright? We are all in the same page here? Well, if I read that post correctly, Sirlin disputes the status of Train as a proper game based on a few of it’s characteristics:

1. It’s not replayable.
2. It’s not released to the public (the physical game itself and the rules) on purpose.
3. It has a set of rules open to interpretation.

Interesting. Let’s start with the boring one shall we?

Since when did replayability enter the definition of the word “game”? Chances are, if the designer’s aim is to communicate a message instead of focusing on “the fun element”, wouldn’t that implicitly mean that said game won’t be very replayable? Then, by Sirlin’s logic, games can’t have communication of ideas as a main goal without ceasing to be games. I know I might have stretched his logic there, and I’m sure this is not what he had in mind when he mentioned it on his posts, but the idea of replayability as a defining factor for games rings hollow to me no matter how much I look at it.

This is the game in question. Yes, those are trains and railroad tracks resting on a window frame with some of the glasses broken .... your guess is as good as mine.

Concerning that second characteristic, I can safely say that, in my opinion, games don’t have to be public to earn the right to be called “games”. I have made games for myself in the past and I have never shown them to anybody else, but that doesn’t revoke their status as “games”. I mean, sure, they are all garbage, but they are still games! This is pretty straightforward though, there’s not that much to think about. Either you think that a game needs a large audience to be called a game or not, there’s not that much to it.

Plus, Brenda has a very, very good reason for not releasing the rules and the game itself to the masses: It would lose almost all the necessary context and surprise factor. How else can you get people to play a game about the holocaust without them knowing about it beforehand? How do you pretend to maintain the potency of the context while mass producing the game?

Anyway, those two characteristics didn’t convince me at all as you have probably noticed by now. However, the third characteristic did  get me thinking: that’s a very good topic right there.

It’s a given that videogames, due to their programmatic nature, can’t exist without firm rules. It’s impossible to make a vague rule and open it to interpretation when there’s absolutely no interpretation going on whatsoever. Sure, you can interpret the meaning of a rule, but you can’t interpret the rule itself. That is, until you break free from that programatic restriction and design a game with real materials and not their digital counterparts.

In any board game, the player will have to read the rules from an instruction manual, interpret them, and if any rule is open to interpretation, talk to everybody else in the group to reach a consensus. That, in itself isn’t particularly interesting, I think we can all agree on that. But Brenda took this characteristic that is intrinsic of any board game and took advantage of it: She designed specifically vague rules to encourage discussion of the rule-set, and as a consequence, get the players [more] involved with how the game plays.

Now, this, to me, doesn’t nullify the status of “game” for Train, because of a simple reason: the rules were designed to be completed and interpreted by the players, and so, it just means more control for the players. The talking stick is shared between the designer and the players in a particularly non-orthodox way.

Yeah, I know, that wasn’t very easy to follow… well, to put it in other terms: It’s an interesting inversion. Take GTA for example. In that game, the rules of the world are immovable, but the player can do whatever he wants within the game. In Train, it’s the exact opposite: the players can’t do whatever they want and they have to follow the rules, but some of the rules have to be filled in by the players as the ambiguities surface.

One thing is for sure, this particular characteristic of Train is the one thing that makes me seriously think about the very definition of the word “game”. If Train falls inside the spectrum covered by the word “game”, then you can bet that it’s at an extreme point in the spectrum.

Does it fall inside of the spectrum? Does it fall outside? … Is it a game or not? Frankly, I don’t know if I care, but if you ask me, yes, it’s a game. It takes strange liberties with the rule-set, yes, but that doesn’t turn it into something else for me, particularly since I don’t know what this “something else” might be.

[Image "tehnically borrowed" from wikipedia]

Warning: Somewhat of a personal note incoming.

I like to make videogames. That’s something that, hopefully, some of you have understood by now. But the reason why I make games and why I like to make games wasn’t answered up until now in this blog. So, I think I should probably put the reason out there, even if nobody cares:

The reason why I make videogames is not because I want to make money off of them.

Or get recognized.

Or become a pioneer of a new medium.

It’s because I like to create. I like to explore uncharted intellectual territory. I like to express myself through many different mediums, and this one just happens to be the most interesting (and challenging) one I’ve encountered so far.

Making videogames may become my full-time job in the future, or it may just stay as a hobby. I frankly don’t know what the future has in store for me, but all I know is that these reasons will stay firm, whether I work for the industry or not.