60 Minutes on Dungeons & Dragons

Oddly enough, I never saw the original 60 Minutes piece on Dungeons & Dragons — and the game's tenuous link to teen suicide — back when it aired back in 1985:





That second video goes into a piece on Thomas Radecki:

Founder of NCTV (National Coalition for Television Violence) and board member on Tipper Gore's PMRC group who once used quoted material from Rona Jaffe's novel Mazes & Monsters as if it was real and factual. Radecki, a psychologist, lost his license to practice for five years for engaging in immoral conduct with a patient. He has since returned to his practice.

Indie game designer earns raves for 'Braid'

Indie game designer Jonathan Blow spent three years and $180,000 making a masterpiece called Braid:

[O]ne of the highest-rated Xbox games of all time — the one sitting there at No. 8, just below “Call of Duty 4” and just above “Guitar Hero II” on the Metacritic charts — is a little downloadable thing decorated in watercolor artwork and steeped in old-school gameplay and basically created by one guy with a punk rock attitude and, if I had to guess, a brain approaching the size of the sun.

Game designer Jonathan Blow — a man with a reputation for speaking his mind whether other people like it or not — spent three years and more than $180,000 of his own money crafting “Braid.” Available for download through Xbox Live Arcade, “Braid” artfully blends old-school 2-D platforming with brain-tweaking puzzle gaming to create a sublime package that plays with the rules of time, plays with expectations, and just generally plays with your mind in a way that has left critics drooling all over themselves with praise.

They’re calling “Braid” “one of the most ingenious puzzle-based games ever devised,” and “a shining example of the intersection between art and technology,” and “the kind of game that will likely change the face of downloadable entertainment.”
[...]
“Braid” is not only earning mountains of praise, it’s also selling well, this despite being priced at $15 (unusually spendy for an XBLA game). According to VGChartz.com, “Braid” has been purchased more than 100,600 times — gangbusters for an indie Arcade game. And while Blow’s contract with Microsoft prohibits him from discussing specifics, he says that between the XBLA sales and the forthcoming PC sales (launching within the next few months), he will have made his money back and more. Most importantly, he will have made enough money to support his next project.

Poor earning virtual gaming gold

Research by Manchester University shows that gold-farming — gathering in-game cash or items to sell for real-world money — is growing rapidly:

Prof Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m.
[...]
Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry.

"The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000," said Prof Heeks. "Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile."

Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games

I've mentioned the Braunstein, the proto-roleplaying game before. Now Ben Robbins discusses the roots of roleplaying games and calls David Wesely The First GM [game-master]:

“French Lancer Colonel. His unit is hiding off the board at (B). He has infiltrated the town in civilian clothes to check out its defenses, and been arrested during the student riot last night. Starts in jail.”
–Braunstein 1

Once upon a time, tabletop gaming meant wargaming. Roleplaying games did not exist yet. Wargamers met and played out famous battles, recreating the last moments of Acre or the charge at Crecy and seeing if maybe with skill and clever tactics they could alter the course of history.

Major David Wesely took his usual wargaming group and tried something a little different. Instead of having them command armies he set down the two opposing leaders in a Prussian town before the battle, their troops nearby but not on stage. To give the other players something to do he let them control other people around town: the Mayor, a school Chancellor, some revolutionary students, etc. The humble town was the eponymous Braunstein, “brown stone” in German.

Wesely felt that the chaotic first Braunstein was a failure, but when he tried to reduce the chaos in subsequent games, the players revolted. They loved the free-form nature of the game.

One player, Dave Arneson, took the out-of-the-box thinking to another level in Braunstein 4, which took place in a Banana Republic facing revolution:

“Peaceful revolutionary. Gets points for printing and delivering leaflets to each of his revolutionaries, and more for handing them out to other civilians (who may be agents or guerrillas of course…). Starts at home. (B-4)”
–Braunstein 4, Banana Republic

“You’re the student revolutionary leader,” Wesely says “You get victory points for distributing revolutionary leaflets. You’ve got a whole briefcase full of them.”

Much later, having convinced his fellow players that he is really, perhaps, an undercover CIA operative, and that the entire nation’s treasury is really much safer in his hands, Dave Arneson’s character is politely ushered aboard a helicopter to whisk him to safety.

Far below the streets are still churning with fighting, plastic soldiers colliding with innocent citizens and angry rioters. In his lap sits the forgotten briefcase of revolutionary leaflets. “I get points for distributing these right?” And with a sweep of his arm he adds insult to injury, hurling reams of pages into the downdraft of the helicopter where they scatter and float lazily down upon the entire town…

Final score: Dave Arneson, plus several thousand points

Army Wants 'First-Person Thinker' Video Game

David Axe notes that "video games are all the rage in the U.S. Army," but "almost all of them are street-level, tactical games for young grunts." Major Kyle Burley, a staffer at the Army War College, wants to see something to help make better generals, something he calls a first-person thinker:

Today Burley uses a moderated, text-based game that simulates top command during an imaginary Second Korean War. Essentially, the game is just a series of chat rooms where colonels hash out potential command decisions, and a moderator decides whether they’re good decisions or not. What Burley wants is an "immersive" game with a live 3D environment and avatars for the players. "Ideally, we would have a virtual, online, Web-access roleplaying environment which allows students to be an avatar [that] probably looks much like the student, and they're given a skin like in Second Life that is equivalent to their position, and they go into different moderated rooms and talk to fellow roleplayers that are in that scenario."

I think Burley is missing the point. There's nothing first-person about being a general; a general gives orders. His job is to get information, usually by talking to people, and make decisions, which has nothing to do with 3D movement.

Kim's Game

I didn't realize that the jewel game from Kipling's Kim had been dubbed Kim's Game and popularized in real life:

Kim, a teenager being trained in secret as a spy, spends a month in Simla, India at the home of Mr. Lurgan, who ostensibly runs a jewel shop but in truth is engaged in espionage for the British against the Russians. Lurgan brings out a copper tray and tosses a handful of jewels onto it; his boy servant explains to Kim:

Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for me. When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib. I will write mine.

They contest the game many times, sometimes with jewels, sometimes with odd objects, and sometimes with photographs of people. It is considered a vital part of training in observation; Lurgan says:

[Do] it many times over till it is done perfectly — for it is worth doing.

In his book Scouting Games, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting, names the exercise Kim's Game and describes it as follows:

The Scoutmaster should collect on a tray a number of articles — knives, spoons, pencil, pen, stones, book and so on — not more than about fifteen for the first few games, and cover the whole over with a cloth. He then makes the others sit round, where they can see the tray, and uncovers it for one minute. Then each of them must make a list on a piece of paper of all the articles he can remember… The one who remembers most wins the game.

Wii Sports Resort

Nintendo's Wii Sports sequel — Wii Sports Resort — goes tropical with three new games: Sword Play, Power Cruising, and Disc Dog.

I have been waiting for a Wii sword-fighting game for a long time — and it looks like there's a reason:

The newly announced Wii MotionPlus — a new accessory that plugs into the base of the Wiimote to provide better tracking of arm movement — will come packed with the game.

Ah, sweet, sweet, faux-light saber action...

Wii Music

I've been wondering how long it would be until someone came out with a free-form version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, where you could play your own music. Now it looks like Nintendo's leading the way, with its upcoming Wii Music:

Nintendo this morning announced a new addition to the Wii family: Wii Music. Instead of your musical creativity being confined by the limitation of the number of plastic instruments that can fit in your living room, Wii Music uses the Wii Remote, Nunchuck and Balance Board to let the user play more than 60 different instruments.

But don't get confused: Wii Music isn't trying to compete with Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Instead, the game's more like an open jam session where players improvise as they go—there are no notes to follow, no one to boo you off stage, no Star Power to reward you for a 100-note streak. It's a non-judgmental way to rock out through your TV.

We heard a drum and sax solo, and then a few Nintendo executives demonstrated full-band play onstage by gracing us with a calypso rendition of the Mario theme song. But we're still unsure how much skill is actually required to "play" each instrument. In fact, Nintendo’s press release says "the music always sounds great," so we're pretty sure anyone can pick up the controllers and put on an impressive show.

The drums were the most interesting instrument demonstrated. The remote and numchuck are used like drum sticks, so you need to move your arms around like you're air drumming to get your sound. The Wii Balance Board is used like the drum pedals on any drum kit. It manages to seem very realistic without requiring a physical set the way Rock Band does. And the game gives you lessons, so theoretically you should learn how to play an actual drum set in a few weeks.

Wii Music also lets you record multi-track videos, so you can be your own one-man band. Or you can be like indy band The Postal Service and send tracks back and forth with friends through WiiConnect24. Bottom line: Even though it might not be as demanding as the other music-making games out there, Wii Music looks like a lot of fun. It will be in stories in time for the holidays—let's just hope that Nintendo ships enough copies to satisfy all the Wii Fanatics out there.

DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding)

I don't have much use for a DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding), but the gamer-geek in me is amused.

(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)

If geeks talked about cookbooks the way they talk about RPG books

If geeks talked about cookbooks the way they talk about RPG books, Lore Sjöberg explains, the results would not be pretty:

Posted: 12:15 a.m. by LordOrcus I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version.

Posted: 12:42 a.m. by KathraxisHey, I have a question! When you preheat the oven, can you start it before you measure out the ingredients, or do you have to do it afterward? Please answer quickly, my friends and I have been arguing about it for four hours and we're getting pretty hungry.

Posted: 12:48 a.m. by Goku1440 I found an awesome loophole! On page 242 it says "Add oregano to taste!" It doesn't say how much oregano, or what sort of taste! You can add as much oregano as you want! I'm going to make my friends eat infinite oregano and they'll have to do it because the recipe says so!

Posted: 1:02 a.m. by barrybarrybarry I can't believe I spent 35 dollars on a cookbook that doesn't have a recipe for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When I buy a cookbook, I expect it to tell me how to cook. And don't tell me to just make a PBJ myself, I'm not some sort of hippy artist pretentious "freeform cook."

Posted: 1:08 a.m. by jvmkanelly Where are the recipes for chatting with friends while cooking? Where are the recipes for conversation over the meal? When I throw a dinner party, I want it to be a PARTY. I guess the idiots who use the Better Joy Cookbook just cook and eat in stony silence, never saying a word or even looking each other in the eye.

Posted: 1:23 a.m. by LordOrcus Hey, guess what? They're coming out with The Better Joy Book of Hors D'oeuvres. It just goes to show that the publishers are a bunch of corporate greedheads who care more about money than they do about cooking. Is it too much to ask for a single cookbook that contains all possible recipes?

Posted: 1:48 a.m. by specsheetHey, everyone. I can tell just by reading the recipe that if you prepare eggs benedict as written, the sauce will separate. My mom always said the other kids made fun of me because they were jealous of my intelligence, so I must be right. Everyone who's saying that they followed the recipe and it came out perfect is either lying, or loves greasy separated hollandaise sauce.

Posted: 1:52 a.m. by IAmEdAs I have pointed out MANY TIMES, several of these recipes contain raisins, and I, like most people, am ALLERGIC to raisins! And before you tell me to substitute dried cranberries, I will reiterate that I am discussing the recipes AS WRITTEN. I do not appreciate your ATTACKING ME with helpful suggestions!

Posted: 2:12 a.m. by HerodotusI just have to laugh at the recipe for Beef Wellington. In Wellington's day, ovens didn't have temperature settings! And pate de foie gras certainly didn't come in cans. It's like the authors didn't even care about replicating authentic early 19th century cooking techniques!

Posted: 2:17 a.m. by LordOrcus I have read the new Better Joy Cookbook and I am devastated to my very core. Their macaroni and cheese recipe, the very macaroni and cheese I've been making since I was in college, has been ravaged and disfigured and left bleeding on the page. Where once it contained only cheddar cheese, now the recipe calls for a mix of cheddar and Colby. It may contain macaroni, and it may contain cheese, but it is not macaroni and cheese. This is a slap in the face and a knife in the gut. You have lost me, Better Joy Cookbook. I would bid you goodbye, but I wish you nothing but the pain and rage you have delivered unto me.

Retropolis Transit Authority

Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz loves the Retropolis Transit Authority, purveyor of Art Nouveau sci-fi t-shirts.




The site is created by geek-artist Bradley W. Schenck, who got his professional start illustrating the Arduin role playing game book Welcome to Skull Tower (1978). Only a true geek-artist could create Ctheltic Cthulhu.

Games Girls Play

Brian Caulfield of Forbes discusses Games Girls Play — that is, the casual video games that adult women play:

Consumers paid $2.25 billion for such games last year, and the demand for titles like "Diner Dash" is growing 20% year-over-year, according to the Casual Gaming Association.

And while casual games appeal to everyone from pre-teens to old men (the world's richest man, Warren Buffet, 77, haunts online bridge parlors while using the handle "T-bone"), women over 35 are the most likely to pay for them; 75% percent of those who pay for casual games are women, and 72% are over 35 years old.

The result: The gaming industry is hustling to remake itself to please these paying customers.

Dungeon Contraband

With Wizards of the Coast due to release the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons on June 6, Klaus Kneale of Forbes discusses Dungeon Contraband:

There have been blog entries about game prototypes, excerpts from the books, interviews with developers and sample adventures. Fans have devoured every morsel. ENWorld.org, a Web site that has covered everything about the release since it was announced August last year, is logging 10 million visits a month.

And fans have been taking notes. Careful notes. Andrew White, a 31-year-old in Calgary, Canada, compiled every rule and statistic mentioned in those tidbits and published his own "4th Edition Pre-Release Rules Compilation" reference. White's project turned into a massive engineering feat itself, going through 12 revisions involving 40 people, and consuming at least 150 hours of White's life. He released an 86-page final version on Thursday. In his spare time, White is working on a doctoral degree in archeology.

Even worse for Hasbro, just before midnight Wednesday, scans of the books appeared online, too. They weren't homebrewed rip-offs like the Chinese editions of Harry Potter — the muttering online is that they were stolen copies of the electronic printing proofs, grabbed when the manuscripts were sent to the printer in March. The clue: Some of the contraband pages have prepress design symbols and a notation that dates the files to 10 days before Wizards announced they had sent the final product off to the printer.

Wizards spokesperson Tolena Thorburn confirmed that the leaked online editions are real. "We are fairly confident that we’ve identified where the leak occurred, and are moving forward on handling it appropriately." The fairly specific nature of the material no doubt left a clear trail to this particular rogue.

Despite the free copies circulating, fans are buzzing on the Web about their plans to buy the books anyway. The purloined copies have even won a few new customers for Wizards: some bloggers who feigned disinterest in the fourth edition now say that the illegal copies have convinced them to buy the new version.

And then there are the slipups. Buy.com shipped out a chunk of the books pre-release. No more than 100 (less than 10% of Buy.com's total preorders for the books) shipped before the error was caught. But the lucky fans who got their copies early have been boasting about their treasure.

Buy.com’s vice president of marketing, Jeff Wisot, says his team is investigating whether there was a miscommunication over the publishing date. "The parties involved have been dealt with and there are consequences for breaking the street date," wrote Scott Rouse, senior brand manager for Dungeons & Dragons, in an online forum.

Jon Favreau's D&D background

Los Angeles Times staff writer Geoff Boucher writes about Jon Favreau's D&D background:

Some filmmakers get their start making shaky home movies, others catch the bug in a high school drama class or maybe through an art institute where they put paint to canvas. Favreau has more of an eight-sided education.

"It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn't have owned up so quickly a few years ago," Favreau said sheepishly.

"It's rough. It's one of the few groups that even comic-book fans look down on. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You're creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it."

Maybe there should be a new Hollywood respect for eight- and 10-sided dice and a talent for troll tales: Robin Williams, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert and Vin Diesel have all professed their passion (past or present) for the role-playing game.

For Favreau, it was the fantasy element that pulled him in, but it was the sense of story that he carried with him.

"It allowed me to not tamp down my imagination; I think there's a tendency to turn that part of you off," he said.

"Every kid has imagination, but at a certain age, that spigot gets turned off. I set it aside in high school. I really couldn't do it now," Favreau said, shaking his head. "There's something in my heart — there was such a stigma to it.

"When I was young, it was exciting, but as I got older it felt like it was keeping me from progressing. You're social in your small circle, but it's asocial to the wider world."

Favreau read comics, but he connected more with J.R.R. Tolkien, especially with Bilbo Baggins, the homebody-turned-hero of "The Hobbit."

"It's about a guy who just wanted to sit by a fire at home and live a very comfortable life, but then he was drawn out into the world onto an adventure," he said. "I always related to that character. That's sort of how I feel now. Going around the world to promote this picture, it's exciting, but it also feels like I just want to sit at home with my family and have a nice boring life."

Fold It!

Fold It! is a new game developed by the Rosetta@Home team (at BakerLab), which harnesses the pattern recognition abilities of its human players to find the lowest-energy folded state of a protein.

A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto

It looks like it was A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto and Take-Two Interactive:

Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest iteration of the hit video game franchise, racked up first-week sales of $500 million, Take-Two Interactive, the game’s publisher, plans to announce on Wednesday. The report exceeded the sales expectations of analysts.

Electronic Arts wanted to acquire Take-Two Interactive before these big numbers came in.

The Braunstein Game

The Braunstein Game paved the way from the world of classical war games to world of role-playing games:

In 1967 [David] Wesely served as referee for a Napoleonic wargame set in the fictional German town of Braunstein. As usual, two players acted as commanders of the opposing armies, but because he was interested in multi-player games, Wesely assigned additional, non-military roles. For example, he had players acting as town mayor, banker, and university chancellor. When two players challenged each other to a duel, Wesely found it necessary to improvise rules for the encounter on the spot. Though Wesely thought the results were chaotic and the experiment a failure, the other players enjoyed the role playing aspect and asked him to run another game.

Wesely thus contributed to the development of RPGs by introducing: (1) a one-to-one identification of player and character, and (2) open-ended rules allowing the players to perform any action, with the result of the action determined by the referee.

Wesely's Braunstein drew inspiration from Diplomacy, a game requiring players to negotiate in between turns. The idea of a referee was derived from "Strategos: A Game of War" (1871,1880) by Charles Totten. Wesely also read and cited as influential "Conflict and Defense: A General Theory" (1962) by Kenneth E. Boulding and "The Compleat Strategyst" (1954) by J.D. Williams.

Wesely subsequently invented a new role playing scenario in which players attempt to stage or avert a coup in a small Latin American republic. Dave Arneson, another member of the MMSA, took over as referee for this scenario, which was also known as a 'Braunstein'. In 1971 Arneson developed a Braunstein set in a fantasy world called Blackmoor, a precursor of Dungeons & Dragons.

I enjoyed these tidbits from a forum post by Wesely:

By the way, I did not like the term "role-playing game" when it appeared, as "role playing games" that had nothing to do with what we were doing, already existed: The term was already being used for (1) a tool used to train actors for improvisation (an example being the Cheese Shop Game since imortalized by Monty Python) and (2) a tool used for group therapy and psychiatric analysis ("Pretend you are an animal. What kind of an animal do you want to be? How does your aniimal feel about Janet?") And using this already overloaded name did not help us look less nutty. I favored "Adventure Game" but that was siezed-upon at the time as a replacement for "Hobby Game" or "Adult Game", and now we are stuck with "RPG".

Even before I went off to the Army in 1970, Dave Arneson was re-running the Latin Amerca "Braunstein", which we had set up at his house, and he soon started inventing new scenarios. Eventually, he expanded them to include ides from "the Lord of the Rings" and "Dark Shadows" which were the "in" book and TV show for us college students in 1968-1970. This led to Blackmoor and then D&D.

While I am beating my own drum, I would like to lay claim to having "invented" polyhedral dice. I was the first person to USE what were then being sold as "Models of the five regular polyhedra" (for mathematics teachers to show to their students), AS DICE. I have since seen a book that claims that the Japanese were already using three D-20s, numbered 0-9 twice, to generate 3-digit decimal random numbers at some time before 1976. So it may be that they also invented this use for polyhedra, but I was unaware of them so I am at least an independant re-inventor. And it was my introducing the D4, D8, D12 and D20 to our gaming group in 1965 that led to them being used in RPGs and D&D.
[...]
Back in 1965, I read the rules to a game published in 1880 that said one could use a "12-sided teetotum" instead of a 6-sided die, for resolving odds of 6:1, 7:1 etc up to 11:1, but did not explain what a teetotum was or how to make one. I had seen a set of models of the regular polyhedra in my High School trig class, and decided that a "12-sided teetotum" must be the 12-sdied thingy (a regular dodecahedron) I had seen in the set. Wanting to try out the game, I went to school, got out the "Edmund Scientific Supplies" catalog, and ordered one set of the polyhedra from them for $6.00 (gasolene was $ 0.20 /gallon then, so that would be about $66.00 in today's money). This set of five polyhedra came with the faces already numbered, to make it easy to see that there were 12 sides on a dodacahedron, or 20 on an icosahedron, which made them easy to use as dice. So they became the ancestors of all the D4, D6, D8, D12 and D20 sets ever sold.

Henchman

Ever wonder where the term henchman comes from?

The first part of the word, which is recorded in English since 1360, comes from the Old English hengest, meaning "horse", notably stallion, cognates of which also occur in many Teutonic languages, such as Old Frisian, German and Dutch hengst.

The word appears in the name of Hengest, the Saxon chieftain, and still survives in English in placenames and other names beginning with Hingst- or Hinx-. It was often rendered as Henxman in medieval English.

Young henchmen, in act pages of honour or squires, rode or walked at the side of their master in processions and the like, and appear in the English royal household from the 14th century until Tudor Queen Elizabeth I abolished the royal henchmen, known also as the children of honour.

The word became obsolete for grooms in English from the middle of the 17th century, but was retained in Scots as "personal attendant of a Highland chief".

It seems to have been revived in English through the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who took the word and its derivation, according to the New English Dictionary, from Edward Burt's Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, together with its erroneous derivation from haunch. The word is, in this sense, synonymous with gillie, the faithful personal follower of a Highland chieftain, the man who stands at his master's haunch, ready for any emergency.

The modern sense of "obedient or unscrupulous follower" is first recorded 1839, probably based on a misunderstanding of the word as used by Scott, and is often used to describe an out-and-out adherent or partisan, ready to do anything.

From the Dungeon to the Dictionary

The game of D&D has popularized a number of words that have since moved from the dungeon to the dictionary — or at least to more common use:

From its inception, Dungeons and Dragons has provided a cornucopia of new vocabulary to its mostly younger audience. As a child, I was filled with wonderment at my first encounter with electrum coins, potions of diminution, and lycanthropic foes. What joy to find treasure hoards full of sardonyxes, olivines, and my semi-eponymous favourite, chrysoprases. How delightful to slay one's imaginary foes with a halberd, guisarme or bec de corbin (this last one was particularly amusing because one of the guys in my gaming group was named Corbin, although I don't ever recall his characters using one). And without the game, thousands of youths would still be holding on to the misconception that a brazier is a support undergarment.

I remember vividly an encounter with my seventh-grade French teacher, who was astonished that I knew the word 'toxic'; I was (and am still) astonished that she was astonished, as I considered it quite ordinary. I told her at the time that it was a 'D&D word', although in actuality I think that toxic is one of those words that all parents should teach their children as soon as possible! It's true that if you want your child simply to learn words outside of any context, Scrabble is a much better vocabulary-building game, but in my experience, Scrabble is mostly about using existing vocabulary, and that in a decontextualized way. Give me D&D any day, and I'll give you a child who learns to love words.

One side effect of a game that is played by so many children, and uses such a rich vocabulary of obscure terms, is that non-standard words acquire considerable currency. So, for instance, the older and etymologically correct but less common petrification has achieved great popularity from its use in D&D and is now over twice as common on the Internet (41000 to 17400 Google pages) over the formerly standard petrifaction. The nonsense-word vorpal used by Lewis Carroll in his poem "Jabberwocky", which from context in the poem probably means 'deadly, keen', through transference to the general term 'vorpal weapon' in D&D, has come to acquire the sense 'capable of beheading' (cf. this article). This abundance of odd words can be a double-edged sword, or perhaps a guisarme of linguistic confusion amidst an arsenal of linguistic joy.

Diablo Isn't So Much a Game

I haven't played Diablo at all, but I have watched it played, and Shamus gives a perfect description:

Diablo isn’t so much a game as a piñata simulator. Click on the monster to kill it and prizes come out!

The Trouble with Hit Points

Shamus (of DM of the Rings fame) loves the logistical aspects of the classic real-time strategy game Starcraft, but he hates micro-managing the tactical aspects of the game — which need micro-managing, because the characters are "too stupid to fight in a sensible manner".

In fact though, the characters aren't stupid; it's the underlying combat model — which goes way, way back, to paper-and-pencil D&D — that's stupid. Witness the trouble with hit points:

During this noble endeavor, we have a couple of lines of marines who encounter one another. Assuming both groups are arranged in an optimal manner (a line facing the enemy) and each unit fires at his closest foe (the one directly across from him, which is what the AI will do by default) then the battle will go to whoever happens to shoot first. If units employed one-shot kill weapons then all battles would be more or less a coin flip.

So, if equal forces face each other with one-shot kill weapons, it's a coin flip. So far, so good. But what happens if characters have ablative hit points and take, say, eight cumulative shots to kill:

But I can direct all my righteous Blue warriors to gang up on one particular member of the vile and hated Red Team. At the end of the first volley one loathsome member of the Red Team is dead (hooray for justice!) and each of my guys has taken one hit, bringing them down to seven hit points. [...] Instead of Blue defeated and Red near death, Red is exterminated like the vermin they are, and Blue is in respectable fighting shape. It’s obvious that micro-managing doesn’t just give you an edge, it completely transforms the outcome of the battle.

The reason this kind of micro-management pays off is not that we moved to hardier warriors; it's that we moved to a combat model that reflects that hardiness the wrong way.

What happens when we give each shot a one-in-eight chance of taking out a marine? We're right back to the sensible results of the original one shot, one kill scenario — a coin flip — even though it's more like eight shots, one kill.

This has another benefit that's more pronounced in a roleplaying game with fewer, but more important, characters: a character might die from the first attack, or he might survive a dozen attacks. This is much more in line with what we know of wounds from modern guns and not-so-modern swords. No one's immune to one single gunshot or stab wound, but guaranteed to die to the eighth.

The Game's the Thing at MTV Networks

The Game's the Thing at MTV Networks:

No Old Media company has placed a more far-reaching bet on gaming. MTVN operates more than 5,000 mobile, console, and online games and virtual worlds — many of them based on TV shows such as MTV's The Real World and Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants. MTVN has even cut a deal to develop new titles with Hollywood über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer of CSI and Armaggedon fame. And this isn't just about kids. The network is keen to hook the growing ranks of so-called casual gamers, including women old enough to have a couple of teenagers in the house.

The appeal of games is simple enough. They are addictive — like "digital crack," says Jeffrey Yapp, an MTVN executive charged with developing new digital ventures. How addictive? Total time spent gaming online hit 11.4 billion minutes in December, up 27% over the previous year, according to Web-traffic tracker comScore. Only e-mail and shopping keep people online longer nowadays. "Of the traffic to our more than 300 Web sites," says Mika Salmi, MTVN's top digital executive, "we know nearly half [of the visitors] have played a game."

MTVN started to ratchet up its game strategy three years ago with a series of acquisitions. The company has plowed $800 million into properties that appeal to a range of ages, from Neopets, a virtual world where kids create their own cartoon critters, to Harmonix Music Systems, which created the all-ages Rock Band, MTVN's rival to the ultra-popular Guitar Hero. The network plans to spend an additional $500 million over the next couple of years buying new titles or building them from scratch.

Casual Gaming Pain and Opportunity

Sean Ryan looks at both the pain and opportunity facing casual gaming:

On the surface, casual games are on fire. There are numerous articles in main stream publications focused on the sector, the success of the Nintendo DS and Wii are primarily due to casual games, and advertising interest is growing, and most of the top 10 in mobile games are seen to be casual, not hard-core, games. It's now becoming common knowledge that everyone plays games, not just young men, and gaming is truly becoming an equal partner to the traditional media sectors of movies, music and television.

He sees a number of pain points:

1. Rising development costs
   It's routine now for developers to tell me their game costs $250K+, and an increasing number are costing more than $500K — that compares to $50K–$100K as recent as 1–2 years ago, and that all comes out of the profit line. A comparable example is in movie sequels, where the rule of thumb is that the sequel costs twice as much and usually does less in revenue.


2. Slowing growth in downloadable games
   After speaking with almost every developer and distributors, it's clear that downloadable "try before you buy" revenue growth is slowing significantly as conversion rates of download-to-pay drop, and as the increasing supply of somewhat undifferentiated games lets most users enjoy a ton of gameplay if they spend just one hour on each game.


3. Increased distribution power
   Although there has been very little actual consolidation among the top casual game distributors (Real, Big Fish, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Wild Tangent), the increasing supply of games, often undifferentiated, means that they can squeeze developers on lower margins, lower prices, and other less favorable terms.


4. Decreasing game prices
   Related to the over-supply of content, lower conversion rates and increasing power of distributors, it's no secret that the effective price of a game has dropped to around $12 from the suggested $20 retail price, and that's due to discounting, inclusion in subscription packages, and other ways to effectively discount the prices of the game to the consumer.


5. Flood of cheap suppliers
   If the last two years were about the entry of Eastern European and Russian developers, this conference was about the rise of Indian dev shops, many promising lower prices, not just to develop third-party IP, but also to distribute their own games, which adds to the glut. Plus there is a tendency of these new entrants to "clone" popular games, which helps to undercut the category, as we have seen in time-management games or what we'll see this year in hidden object games.

The opportunities involve Flash games.

Nabi Studios

BusinessWeek has done a "game maker profile" on tiny niche developer Nabi Studios, creators of Toribash — which seemed tailor-made for someone like me, but which didn't hold my attention when I took a look a while back:

In Toribash, an online fighting game populated by characters that resemble ball-and-stick rag dolls, players design their own black-belt martial arts moves. The resulting movements are hyperrealistic: Lithe fighters leap, cartwheel, and spin-kick one another, severing heads and limbs, notching points for each hit.

I question the use of "hyperrealistic" to describe "severing heads and limbs" in unarmed combat — but the movements are, or can be, hyperrealistic.

Here's where things get more interesting, from a business perspective:

But Toribash's founder, Hampus Söderström, didn't want to make just another fighting game. He wanted to create an online community where users could design and share their own fighting techniques alongside the no-holds-barred brawling. So Söderström included a wide range of community building tools — including chat, wikis, and discussion boards — outside of the main game play. The developer's site also hosts an active marketplace where users can sell and buy virtual additions for the game's characters for cash or credits.

In the last two years, Toribash has become a virtual community with more than 42,000 members. Its members even flip-kick one another as they chat, exchange ideas in a public forums, and give direct feedback to the game's developers. On meticulously maintained wiki pages and discussion boards, players collaborate, designing complex fighting moves and sharing combat tips. To date, the game has received almost 30 official updates while gamers have played Toribash more than 3 million times on the official servers, with top players racking up 20,000-plus games.
[...]
Söderström is a gaming newbie. After 10 years in his native Sweden as a Unix programmer at IBM (IBM) and Swedish telecom companies, he moved to Singapore in 2004. In his spare time, he worked on designing a game that combined simple animation, physics, and user-generated martial arts. Eight months later, he had created Toribash (tori is the Japanese martial arts term for "the defender"). After completing the beta version, Söderström sensed he had come up with something that was both popular and potentially profitable.

But without game industry experience, Söderström also knew he needed help. In 2006, he brought in a community manager, a graphics designer, and a developer to form Nabi Studios. And he quickly adopted the business model of letting users play for free and encouraging them to pay for character enhancements that could fund the company. In Toribash, players win credits with each victory, but they can also buy additional credits with real cash. The average Toribash accessory sells for about $35 (or 35,000 Tori Credits), though Söderström says he recently sold special, limited-edition blood color (the game is often gruesome) for $500. This, says Söderström, is the company's only source of revenue.

It's lucrative, too. So far, Söderström has made enough money to hire four more staffers in Singapore as well as three part-timers around the world. His current challenge is managing the game's virtual economy: So many users are playing games and winning credits—or converting their cash into more Tori Credits—that it's created a glut of credits, driving down their value. "This definitely was not something we initially thought would be part of the game," he says.

Giant d20 in MIT's Killian Court

This Giant d20 in MIT's Killian Court was, of course, placed there in honor of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

Storming the Campuses

The New York Times explains how students are Storming the Campuses — in a game that mixes Risk and real-life maps of schools and dorms:

Eleven thousand Ivy League students and alumni have played out these scenarios as part of an online computer game called GoCrossCampus, or GXC. The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.

GXC more closely resembles an intramural or interscholastic sport than the typical online video game, where individuals or small groups are pitted against each other. GXC teams, made up of hundreds and sometimes thousands of players, play on behalf of real-world dorms or schools — even presidential candidates — by jostling for hegemony on maps of their campus or locale and conducting their campaigns as much in the real world as online.

It turns out though that GXC isn't the only game in the new sub-genre. Two Startups Battle Over Who Invented Risk-Like War Game First:

What started off as a for-fun experiment by Yale student Gabe Smedresman in January 2007 resulted in a game that went on for over a month and involved over 3,300 Yale students (more than 25% of the student body).

But now that original game of Turf has spawned two separate and funded startups to push the game as a business. Smedresman joined with Harvard students Andrew Fong, Matt O’Brien, and Hugo Van Vuuren to found Kirkland North, a Y Combinator backed startup (screen shot of their game is above). Meanwhile, a rival company has launched that was founded by some of the players of Smedresman’s original game, called GoCrossCampus.

A New York Times article today written by Brad Stone profiles GoCrossCampus and suggested the founders invented the game and said “The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.” There was no mention of Kirkland North or Smedresman’s original work in that article.

Online Games by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins

Big-name advertisers are paying for Online Games by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins:

On Tuesday, Nickelodeon is expected to announce the first of 600 original and exclusive games for its network of Web sites, as part of a $100 million investment in game development.
[...]
With a series of customized sites for different age groups (preschoolers, tweens, teenage boys, moms), Nickelodeon calls itself the “biggest gaming network in the country.” Movie studios, video game publishers, and toy makers are among the top marketers on the sites. In the online games market, its stiffest competition comes from Yahoo Games, which had 15.5 million unique visitors in February according to the measurement firm comScore.

With more than 12 million visitors each, Electronic Arts and Disney.com are also leaders in the arena. (By comparison, Microsoft’s online game network, Xbox Live, has about 10 million members.)

The N, Nickelodeon’s teenage network, has dozens of games for children aged 12 to 17. Slightly younger players are directed to Nick.com, which drew an average of 7.9 million visitors in February and is expected to add 185 games this year. The youngest players of all are welcome on the sites of Nick Jr. and Noggin, where games are meant to be played by children “on the laps of their moms,” Ms. Zarghami said.

The company also owns Neopets, a virtual pet Web site. The investment will add scores of new games to each site in the coming year.

Geek Love

Adam Rogers, a senior editor at Wired, has written a piece for the New York Times dedicated to Gary Gygax — Geek Love:

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Gary Gygax Passes to the Happy Hunting Grounds

Gary Gygax Passes to the Happy Hunting Grounds, according to the "Troll Lord" of Troll Lord Games, Stephen Chenault:

It is almost too much to get my mind about. But I've just had news that our dear Dungeon Master has passed away. Ernie called this morning, he thought we should let the fans know. He's just sent an email out.

Gary was in his home when he gathered himself up to cross the great divide.

He was a very dear friend of mine. And I will miss him so.

God Speed My Friend.

Steve

Addendum: NPR interviews Stephen Chenault:

Imagine a mournful horn echoing across thousands of fantasy worlds: E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, died Wednesday morning. He was 69.

Gary Gygax was an icon to fans of the game, many of whom would show up at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis.

What began as a fantasy game published in book form in the early 1970s, eventually morphed and tumbled onto kitchen tables and dorm room floors. Players assumed the character of elves and dwarves, magicians and swordsmen, and confronted the primal conflict between good and evil.

"D&D," as fans call it, is the granddaddy of popular online games that attract hundreds of thousands of gamers to the Internet today.

Stephen Chenault, owner of Troll Lord Games, was a close friend of Gary Gygax. He talks to Melissa Block about Gygax and the beloved game he helped create.

Echocrome Trailer

I never thought I'd see an M.C. Escher video game. This Echocrome Trailer is mind-bending:

Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

I obviously wasn't the only person to look at Guitar Hero and think, Couldn't you do this with real guitars? Behold, Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes:

Microsoft's Games Get Serious

Microsoft's Games Get Serious as they finally open up their Flight Simulator — they call the package ESP:

It's the first time a major software company has entered the "serious"—or nonentertainment—games arena with a product to help other corporations build their own employee-training video games in-house via a simple, Windows-based program. And priced at only $799 per license, Microsoft ESP poses a cost-effective threat to smaller studios that develop custom games—at a cost of $500,000 and up per game—for corporations, hospitals, and the armed forces.

For years, companies such as military contractor Northrop Grumman (NOC) had contacted Microsoft, asking if they could license the game engine for Flight Simulator. "Since the late 1990s, there have been ongoing inquiries to our game studio by various companies who ask, 'Can we use this for training? How can we make it do this or that?'" recalls David Boker, senior director of the Business Development Group at Microsoft's Aces Studio, one of Microsoft's game studios, where ESP and Flight Simulator were developed. But at first, Microsoft wasn't interested.
[...]
Northrop Grumman, for instance, has been beta-testing the ESP platform and its early incarnations for the past several months. It saw significant slashes in budgets and schedules. One team used ESP to create a prototype of an aviation simulation training game—in only three days.

"Typically, the same type of simulation would have taken six to 18 months to make from scratch," says Randy Schmidt, a technical director at Northrop Grumman. "I was surprised." Schmidt says the Windows-based platform and the easy-to-use interface of the software made it simple to choose from a library of cockpit, terrain, and other design elements—all originally created for the Flight Simulator video game—and combine them with Northrop Grumman's own visuals and software.

Schmidt adds that to build a complete training aviation simulation—beyond the prototype phase—with realistic 3D graphics from scratch and for a military customer, could still cost well into the tens of millions of dollars. But the cost savings, in terms of purchasing the $799 license for Microsoft ESP that can be used for multiple serious games, is vast, he says. The Windows interface is designed so that in-house designers can create a simulation without writing new code (so no expense of hiring an outside developer). "The entertainment-game graphics are quite realistic," he says. "Some of the military sims look like poor-man's versions of video games."

How board game helped free POWs

Brian McMahon explains how a board game helped free POWs from Nazi prison camps:

Along with the standard thimble, car, and Scotty dog, the POW version [of Monopoly] included additional "playing" pieces, such as a metal file, a magnetic compass, and of course, a regional silk escape map, complete with marked safe-houses along the way — all neatly concealed in the game's box.

Even better, some of the Monopoly money was real. Actual German, Italian, and French currency was placed underneath the play money for escapees to use for bribes.

Also, because of its collaboration with the International Red Cross, Waddington could track which sets would be delivered to which camps, meaning escape maps specific to the area could be hidden in each game set. Allied soldiers and pilots headed to the front lines were told to look for the special edition game if they were captured. The identifying mark to check for? A red dot in the corner of the Free Parking space.

Universities bring video games into classrooms

Universities bring video games into classrooms:

Doug Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, is developing a game for students ages 10 to 12 that aims to teach ideas and skills not found in traditional textbooks.

"Because games are experiential they might be good at teaching things that you learn through experience, and that are difficult to teach through books," Thomas said in an interview.

His game, Modern Prometheus, uses the story of Frankenstein to teach ethical decision making.

Shelley's original novel is subtitled, The Modern Prometheus; that's where the game's name come from.

The player assumes the role of Dr. Frankenstein's assistant, who is forced to make a series of difficult choices that impact the game's outcome.

Speaking of the original novel, it does not include a hunchbacked assistant named Igor. Nor does the movie, actually; there the assistant is named Fritz.

Anyway, the game is not about staying true to the source material:

To complicate matters, Thomas and his team added a twist — the assistant must help the doctor cure a plague that is threatening the town's residents. One dilemma is whether or not to steal body parts from a cemetery — a key requirement for curing the disease.

"Stealing a brain is hard to justify ethically, but doing all this work that seems kind of shady in the present is actually going to save the town in the long run," Thomas said.

"We want them to really wrestle with doing things and ask, 'Is it good for me, or is it good for everyone else?' There is no right way or wrong way to play it," he explained.

The aim, Thomas said, is for students to play the hour-long game individually, then discuss the choices they made with their teachers and classmates.

"It's not just a game but also the conversation that happens around it," Thomas said. "When kids play games they don't just play them, they also talk about them with each other. There's a huge amount of informal learning that goes on."

The real challenge is getting the game into schools:

One challenge for Modern Prometheus and other classroom games is finding teachers willing to incorporate them in their lesson plans.

"It's really hard for teachers to work with an unfamiliar technology that the kids know more about than they do," Thomas said. "They feel like 'my job is hard enough already.'"

He also acknowledges that the game doesn't quite fit into many established middle-school curricula.

Serious Taboos

As I've already mentioned, in Serious Play, Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab, examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation.

He notes that when we want to learn about an organization, we should fight the impulse to look at what it puts into its models and simulations:

"I've learned that you learn far more about an organization from what they won't model than from what they do," asserts political scientist Garry Brewer, coauthor of the classic study of U.S. military simulations The War Game. "What I've observed — in both the military and private industry — is that organizations frequently leave out the very assumptions that are most important or most threatening to their sense of themselves. They always have a 'good reason' for this.... As a result, many organizations expend an extraordinary amount of effort developing models that can never be as useful or as valid as they say they want."

For example:

In its war games during the 1980s, for example, the U.S. Navy would not allow aircraft carriers — its biggest, most expensive, and perhaps most controversial weapons platform — to be sunk hypothetically. This taboo persisted even after the Argentines successfully sank a British carrier during the Falklands War. It held fast even when the navy's own submariners argued that carriers were particularly vulnerable to under-sea attack. For a variety of budgetary, political, interservice-rivalry and national-security reasons, the navy was permitted to run extensive war games and simulations in which its biggest and most vulnerable carriers were given a pass. The taboo was tacitly respected in virtually all formal reviews. External efforts to simulate conflicts in which carriers were destroyed were met with threats of security classification. One result, documented in Thomas B. Allen's War Games, a popular history of U.S. war gaming, is that the navy acquired a reputation for cheating that undermined the credibility of naval proposals and exacerbated interservice rivalries. This particular taboo was deeply ironic because, as Harvard's Stephen Peter Rosen ably documents in Winning the Next War, simulations and war games had been largely responsible for encouraging the navy to adopt aircraft carriers in the first place.

I discussed the U.S. Navy's effective use of war games in Learning to Learn to Fight.

Erratum: I bow to mon frère's superior war-nerditry, for he caught this error in Schrage's text: The HMS Sheffield was a destroyer not a carrier.

Serious Games

There has been a lot of talk about serious games the past few years. What I did not realize was that a fellow named Clark Abt wrote a book called Serious Games back in 1970. Yes, 1970.

Abt had worked at Raytheon and served in the Air Force, and he wanted to take wargaming out of its narrow, military role and expand it to include all kinds of policy issues — and to use it as an educational tool.

What might shock modern serious-gamers is that he was working almost entirely with manual games — computers were still expensive behemoths reserved for big-budget military simulations.

If you're a fan of SimCity, you should note that Abt describes a multiplayer Simpolis game in this text, years ahead of the PC breakout hit.

How to Create "House Rules"

Scott Meyer, in his Basic Instructions comic, explains How to Create "House Rules" for games.

Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game

Michael Fitzgerald explains Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game:

Work is not play. But maybe it should be.

In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management. Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. Unfortunately, most of the software is the business equivalent of calorie counting. No one does it gladly. Worse, the software has a Big Brother aspect to it.

“C.R.M. software is designed to let your manager peek at you,” Mr. Johnston says. He notes that even at Entellium, based in Seattle, he has had trouble getting his sales staff to update their data consistently. Reasoning that sales people are wildly competitive, he thought that they would respond to a program that showed where they stood against their goals — or their peers’. Hence, Rave, which Entellium introduced in April.

Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new t