Aim for the Head

A while back in my first ‘Stuff on the Net’ links, I provided a like to the Video Game Voters Network. Basically, you sign up that you agree that legislation against games is stupid (just like legislation against movies, which there isn’t except with regards to pornography), and they will automatically draft and send a letter on your behalf to your senator.

Well, I signed up, and the letter was sent. Monday, my senator, Saxby Chambliss, sent back a reply:

Dear Mr. Pace:

Thank you for contacting me with your concerns regarding S.2126, the Family Entertainment Protection Act. I understand your concerns, and I appreciate hearing from you.

As a father and a grandfather, I understand the concern about young children being exposed to graphic pictures of violence and explicit sexual content. And while I believe it is the responsibility of parents to make sure that children are not exposed to such material, parents must have the tools necessary to protect their children and we, in Congress, must pass meaningful legislation to aid parents.

S.2126 would prohibit a business from allowing children under the age of seventeen access to any video game deemed mature, or for adults-only. This bill certainly will not prevent adolescents from playing these video games; however, they must first obtain parental approval, by way of the parents purchasing the game for the child. Should this legislation come before the Senate I will certainly keep your views in mind.

I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure that children are protected from any kind of unsuitable material. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me. If you would like to receive timely email alerts regarding the latest congressional actions and my weekly e-newsletter, please sign up via my web site at: www.chambliss.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to be in touch if I may ever be of assistance to you.

Sincerely,

Saxby Chambliss
United States Senate

As always, my first and foremost problem with all this is that the government should not be regulating this. At all. At most, they should review the ESRB rating system and ensure that games are being properly labelled. Of course, some people say things like, “CDs with mature lyrics have stickers, and that was the government.” But no, it’s not. The government tried to do it, but in order to keep government out, record companies voluntarily added the mature content stickers. “But what about TV ratings?” Well, the government has enforced that all TVs/VCRs/etc will have a V chip to allow a parent to control what their family watches, but the TV ratings themselves are done by the TV networks themselves to advise of content. “But its illegal to sell a ticket to an R rated movie to someone under 17!” No, it isn’t. While many movie theaters hold to that principle, movie ratings are not based in law, but are a system adopted by the MPAA to self regulate. The truth is, the government does not need to be involved with games because the ESRB is the most comprehensive system out there, and even will re-rate games if concern about an original rating is brought up.

And that gets into my second problem here… My senator wants to protect kids from bad stuff. Now, I’d say he should be backing initiatives that will allow parents to be better parents, but beside that, he is supporting a bill that will effectively do nothing. Do you honestly think that the majority of kids are buying these games for themselves? I go to Best Buy, to EB, Toys R Us, and other stores, and I never see young kids putting money down for games. The parents are buying these games for their kids despite the ratings system. Banning the sale of Mature and Adult rated games to kids will have very little impact at all. Parents will still blindly buy the same games for their kids for any of a number of reasons. About the only way to make a change would be to force the parent to watch a highlight video of the game’s worst moments before making a purchase to ensure they have actually seen what their kids are going to see.

Part and parcel to that, he is backing an Act against games, but if he really feels that kids need to be governmentally protected, the Act should be ammended to include all forms of media. Make it illegal to sell a ticket to R rated movies to kids under 17. Make it illegal to sell mature stickered music CDs to kids. Make it illegal for… err… I was going to say something about TV shows, but short of making it illegal for networks to broadcast them, well, there isn’t anything that can be done, and going that far would indeed be censorship. But hey, the V chip seems to be a good initiative. I mean, I doubt I’ll ever use mine, but I suspect that if I have kids one day I’ll feel better knowing its there and I could turn it on if I find that I don’t have time to be a part of my kid’s daily TV watching. So why not instead legislate a V chip for games, so that consoles and PCs won’t play mature rated games without an access code. I mean, if our government trusts parents with TV content, why not trust them with game content?

Over at Nerfbat, Blackguard has posted about the need for good graphics in games and its gotten me thinking…

I am one of those people who says that the graphics of a game shouldn’t matter. And to a point, its true. For a really good game, the gameplay should be compelling enough that enjoyment of the game shouldn’t be affected by the graphics. However, as Blackguard points out, graphics are how most people get their first glimps of the game, and advertising is based almost entirely around screenshots with game features coming later more through word of mouth than actual ads.

Where my issue comes in is that I feel that too often the graphics lead the game instead of suppliment or compliment the gameplay. Too many games spend so much time working on realism or fansy shaders and animations, and push the envelope on system requirements, that they lose track of making a game worth playing and that a large enough portion of the public can play. At the rate technology moves, and the fact that game developers keep right up on the bleeding edge most of the time, if you are at all serious about games you probably need to buy a new computer every year, or at least a few hefty upgrades. Of course, not everyone can afford that.

I think one of the major successes of World of Warcraft is that they game runs well on moderate, even low end machines. Personally, I’m running a 1.2GHz Althon with 1GB RAM and a 256MB ATI 9800 video card. It runs very well, except in Ironforge and in open PvP with a hundred or more people running around. I play Half-Life 2 on it also, another success. I tried to play EverQuest 2 on it, and it just died. I got the game to finally run smoothly by turning down the graphics so far that it wasn’t worth my time. 8-bit or Nintendo style graphics I can handle, but fuzzy blobs running around fuzzy blobby landscapes I can’t. City of Heroes ran fairly well. I didn’t have all the highend particles turned on, but not many people do. City of Villains upgraded the graphics engine just enough that I had to tune down the graphics just below the threshhold of “playable”. When the faces lose their eyes, its actually borderline disturbing.

And that leads into another issue I’ve got… why haven’t any companies made a game that actually tunes down? Why isn’t there a slider to reduce polygon counts and use “flatter” textures? Instead, as the sliders move toward the low end, you lose definition and the world begins to look like you forgot to put on your glasses, like a bad runny watercolor painting as things blend and smear into each other.

Perhaps I just need to accept the fact that I need to put in my budget a thousand bucks a year on computer upgrades… no wait, two thousand because I have to upgrade the wife’s PC as well. I can’t imagine having a family and needing to keep three, four, even five PCs up to date. Five grand a year just so the family can continue to game together. It makes you want to go buy some board games…

One thing that irritates me in games is the lack of reality in certain aspects. Don’t get me wrong, I think being able to carry a half dozen backpacks loaded with gear is actually a good idea because reality in this care would impeed fun since you’d have to keep running back to town and dropping off loot instead of playing.

However, in combat, I am annoyed with people who whiz around running at full speed and jumping like they are on crack.

In reality, if you tried to attack someone with a sword while you ran around them in a circle, sidestepping, while jumping every second, you’d be fairly inaccurate and your swings would be pretty weak. In order to get good power into a swing, either you have to be charging, using your momentum to push the blade, or you have to plant your feet on the ground to support the muscular force you wish to bring to bear.

So, to that end, I wish to introduce a little reality into the game. Movement in any direction other than toward your enemy should have a negative impact on accuracy and power (damage). Moving toward an enemy should increase power based on the distance travelled (makes horseback lance fighting a possibility), and standing still should positively impact accuracy (chance to hit). Jumping should pretty much destroy accuracy and power. However, on the other side, if you are moving any direction but toward your enemy, your ability to dodge should increase. Jumping will actually make you harder to hit.

Now the question is “Well, I could just be jumping when I’m defending and stand still when attacking. Right?” No, not with any noticable effect. The jumping, or moving away from an opponent, would cap fairly quickly and be only a small modifier. The attack bonuses would be greater the longer you stayed still (or charged). So the end result of the proposed scenario would be “You’d be a little harder to hit, but have almost no attack bonus.”

It makes the combat engine very complex, and means that reduction of client/server lag is of paramount importance, but I think it would make for a much better game, especially in PvP.

A while back, some friends and I started up some old fashioned pen & paper gaming. It started out with an AD&D (original rules) campaign, and has since turned into a rotating two campaign (two different DMs) 3.5 ruleset playday.

I had forgotten how fun face-to-face gaming can be.

Its refreshing to know that content won’t be broken (or “working as intended”), and there will be no farming or camping, unless we want to grow some crops or tell stories around the camp fire. There will be no lists, no looking for a group, no raid attendance or DKP. There will be no spam of Chuck Norris jokes (though jokes and puns are numerous around the gaming table), and one begging people to join his guild that plans to do end game raiding and be the most uber guild ever in under a month if people will just join he’s offering a gold for every person to sign his guild charter come on!

The feats of our characters are limited only by our imaginations, the will of the DM, and the luck of the dice. Death is a real threat and not a feature of the game mechanics. Losing is losing, not thirty seconds of downtime.

Currently, in the first of our games, I play a fighter. The band of adventurers I’ve fallen in with consist of a ranger, a paladin, a cleric, and two scouts *cough*rogues*cough*. Well, one scout. Last session, one of the scouts was turned into pasty goo by a giant. In the land we find ourselves in, I have taken over a garrison outpost of the local lord. We reclaimed it from the evil that had infested it and have now restocked and restaffed it to help hold against the wilds of the forest. Unlike most MMO games, or even single player games, here I feel like a hero. While trying to retake the outpost, we’d gotten inside and an army came to take it back from us. Suddenly the tables had turned, and while we had stealthily fought our way inside, now we had to repell invaders. Most armies of foot soldier are made up of level 0, or at best level 1, fighters. I was level 5. I also had a potion we’d recovered on an earlier adventure that could make me invulnerable to non-magic weapons for a short time. Long enough though to drop to the outside and wade into the army while my friends supported from the walls with bow and crossbow. Damn, that felt good.

In our second game, well, we haven’t gone too far, but I’m a mage this time, a sorcerer of dragon blood. I expect no less joy from these adventures.

I suppose one of the better parts is the limited nature of the game. Everyone who plays honestly wants to play. There is roleplay, not sissy “thee” and “thou” garbage, but people actually playing roles… the rogues are sneaky, I command armies, the paladin does the right thing even when it may not be the best thing. The game has no end, so there is no end game. There is no level rush, or gear to get. The game just is.

Oh yeah… I had forgotten how much fun this could be.

One of the things that continues to baffle me is the push for more intense, more realistic graphics in games. While I’m sure that focus groups have show that people respond to the “better” graphics, and that shelf sales increase based on graphics buzz, every game I’ve ever played, and every game everyone I know has ever played, gets played longer based on the game play and has nothing to do with the graphics.

Seriously, if the game sucks, you put it down. In MMORPGs while box sales are important, continued subscribers and word of mouth are what make a game a long term success. World of Warcraft doesn’t have the best graphics in the world. Sure, they are highly stylized and pretty, but the fact that my 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI 9800 machine runs it great is just awesome. Other games that have come out almost refuse to install on my computer at all. And while I don’t want to put down WoWs graphics, its clearly obvious upon long and repeated play that Blizzard spent alot more time on game content and less time on the graphics than some of their competitors.

At arcades all over the world, despite their being a number of “better” games graphics wise, people still continue to put quarters in games like Pac-Man. Simple graphics with immediately engaging game play. City of Heroes grasped this concept well. With its fast paced wham-bang superhero action, its almost pure fun. Its only real flaw is that the snail’s pace at which later levels progress will make any but the more hardcore gamers and diehard fans stop logging in to play.

So, for me, the perfect MMORPG would have “good” yet not overly expensive or time consuming graphics. Less polygons and shaders, more variety of color and style, and with the millions being saved not being spent on a AAA graphics team, I’d be able to hire a few more content designers to help keep the game exciting to play even if its not the most exciting to look at.

The Senate is having a hearing on Video Game Violence, and here you can read the statements given in testamony.

The first statement is by Steve Strickland, a minister whose brother was one of three police officers killed by a teenage boy. The boy took one officer’s gun, shot him, then executed the other two officers. Of course, Jack Thompson, lawyer for the persecution of game designers, has convinced this man that this teenager would never have hurt anyone if it hadn’t been for playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I’ve got a brother who has played this game. He’s played it alot. The entire thing through, every mini-game, several times over. My brother has never shot anyone. Nor has he stolen cars, raped women, blown up buildings or anything else depicted in the game. In fact, I’d say the game has had no effect on my brother at all. He is the same easy going happy guy he has always been. Perhaps he’s just waiting for the right moment to explode.

The next statement comes from Elizabeth Carll, chair of a department of the AMA that believes that violence on TV makes people violent. So of course, they also believe that violent video games make people violent. The AMA has released this document as a call for what must be done to protect our kids. One of the bullet points of her statement I really enjoyed:

Encourage the entertainment industry to link violent behaviors with negative social consequences. Showing violence without realistic consequences teaches children that violence is an effective means of resolving conflict. Whereas, seeing pain and suffering as a consequence can inhibit aggressive behavior.

The emphasis is mine, because, well, perhaps kids shouldn’t watch the news or read history books either. Violence (war) has been an effective means of resolving conflict for a very long time.

Third we’ve got a statement from another psychologist, Dmitri Williams, who says the smartest thing so far: We don’t know. Internet media and gaming on the level we are talking about is a relatively new area. There are no 30 year studies because violent video games haven’t been mainstream for 30 years yet. As he points out, most of these studies are 10 minute and 30 minute studies, and legislators trying to pass game laws ignore the longer, more in-depth studies, like his own one month test because they show that nothing is conclusive. Also games of huge disparity are often tested together. One such study used sessions of playing Wolfenstein 3D with sessions of playing Myst. The problem is that its not just a case of one game being violent and the other is non-violent, but one game is a fast paced shooter while the other is a plodding puzzle solver.

Next, David Bickham comes in and basically says that the problem isn’t violent video games, but prolonged exposure to violence being rewarded. You know, I can’t say he’s wrong, but as I said a couple of paragraphs above, you can’t limit that to just video games and media. After watching our own government trounce people’s basic freedoms and fight a few wars, the idea that might makes right becomes pretty prevalent through just watching or reading the news. He also says that younger kids are more susceptable to this exposure and what amounts to a desensatization to violence, and again I can’t disagree. But I don’t think legislation is where this needs to be address unless we are going to legislate parents being better parents. Yep, 8 year olds playing Grand Theft Auto might end up with a warped sense of reality and violence, but what parent in their right mind allows their 8 year old to play GTA? And the funny thing is, even though he’s arguing for the wrong side, he agrees with me:

As caretakers of the next generation, we have a responsibility to provide children with a safe environment in which to grow, develop, and learn. As a society, we have decided that we should understand and control the quality and safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat. Research has shown that the media children use have real effects on their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. In the Information Age, media must be understood as a powerful, nearly universal environmental health influence. We ensure the safety of what we feed children’s bodies, we owe it to their future and to the future of our society to ensure the safety of what we feed their minds.

The only difference is that he’s fighting for more laws, more organizations, more government, while I’d prefer parents just pay attention to their kids.

Then we come to Jeff Johnson of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Basically all I have to say about him is that he’s trying to force stores to be penalized for parents not being good parents. Who lets their kids rent or buy games on their own? If you, as a parent, don’t at least look into it before they do it, you are a bad parent. Get better, please.

Now we come to Paul Smith who says, with lots of legal references, that games fall under the same first ammendment protection as books, film and TV. Did you know its not illegal to sell a ticket to an R rated film to an 8 year old? The movie theater may refuse to do it, but there is no law. The MPAA ratings are a suggested guideline. The ESRB already has in place a much better rating system than the MPAA so that parents can make informed decisions about what to buy for their kids. In short: If you don’t want your kids playing violent games, then don’t let your kids play them.

The last statement, from Kevin Saunders, kind of bores the hell out of me. He’s just reviewing the reasons behind various court decisions, and in the end says that even though they keep losing the battles to restrict game, they will keep on fighting because the Supreme Court hasn’t told them “no” yet. One of the most important statements made is:

Judge Kennelly also expressed concern over the size of the community of those studying the issue and the relationships among the scientists. He noted that, of the seventeen research articles relied on by the Illinois General Assembly, fourteen were authored or co-authored by Professor Craig Anderson, one by a colleague of Professor Anderson, and two by a scientist who relied on Professor Anderson’s research in designing his own studies. This concern might be eased by recognizing that the articles all survived peer review, but the concern might simply transfer to the peer review process and the small community from which referees might be drawn. It should, however, be noted that Professors Anderson’s and Bushman’s meta-analysis of the research in the field included studies by a significant number of scientists unaffiliated with Professor Anderson. See Craig A. Anderson & Brad J. Bushman, Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Effect, Physiological Arousal and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic View of the Scientific Literature, 12 Psychol. Sci. 353 (2001): Craig A. Anderson, An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games, 27 J. Of Adolescence 113 (2004). While these concerns of the court do not even currently seem valid, the continuing development of this area of scholarship and the attention paid by an increased number of scientists should eventually overcome the perceived shortcoming.

While he takes the stance that the court shouldn’t be worried by the lack of variety in sources for study, its important that he mentions it because this is the real problem. Out of 17 studies used by the people trying to pass a game restricting law 14 of them were written by the same guy, and the other three were a friend of his and two people who used his research for the bulk of their work. I think the effect of games on kids should most definately be studied, but right now there just isn’t enough data from which to draw anything close to concrete that would justify the legislation of games exceeding that which already doesn’t exist for other forms of media.

Anyway, in case you haven’t guess yet, I’m against legislating access to video games. Frankly, our society fosters a lifestyle in which neither parent is encouraged to stay home with the children. Raising children is the single more important thing we as a people can do, and yet “homemaker” is a derrided job title. If the US government really want to have an impact on protecting children, institute a new tax write off: If one of your dependants is classified as a homemaker for your other dependants, you get an extra bonus deduction. Reward people for being better parents and they’ll desire to be better parents.

One thing every game has to deal with somewhere in its design is the penalty for losing. Some games have opted to have none, but in my opinion this leads to the “lemming effect” where player has absolutely no fear of losing and will repeatedly slam into a brick wall until the wall gives in. Other games have chosen to allow methods for the reduction of penalties, like clones, insurance, returning to your body, praying at your death site, etc… the list goes on forever.

Long ago, EverQuest had a very stiff penalty, depending on your level at the time, you would lose experience equal to ten to twenty percent of your level. On some levels, that was hard to earn back. To that end, players avoided death, and dying made them angry. Later, Sony reduced the death penalty enough that the last few groups I was in before I quit didn’t really seem to care about death at all. And of course, experience loss deaths mean very little when you are level capped and have a good buffer.

Other games, like City of Heroes, maintained the exp loss death, but also allowed you to continue forward progress, and you could never lose a level. You earn “debt”, and while you had it fifty percent of your experience went to pay it off and the other fifty percent went toward your next level. Sort of good, but it lead to people not minding defeat, which in a superhero game leads to a little more heroism (but a lot more stupidity). Of course, with CoH having a penalty actually helped because it forced you to level slowed, gain more influence (money), and be able to keep up to date on your power enhancements (store bought).

The one thing all of the games I’ve played have in common, and the thing I would like to see change, is they all have one kind of defeat. Just one. You die, you lose exp. You fall, you get debt. You are killed, you drop an item (Asheron’s Call). You lose, your equipment is damaged (World of Warcraft).

Why no variety?

What I’d love to see in games is multiple layers of defeat. Why must lose of hitpoints always equal death? Why must monsters you fight be relentless until they kill you? When a mugger attacks me in the city, why not have him beat me into unconsciousness, steal some money and then run away? If I enter hostile territory, why can’t they beat me down, then if they defeat the entire party, drag us to the edge of their land and leave us for dead? Why can’t I be disarmed, paralyzed, and laughed at?

I don’t see a reason for having so few options except that the more options you have, the more code it requires. Building a bigger box.

One big topic of discussion when it comes to any MMO game is its “death penalty”. Mostly this is because people want to know, up front, what’s going to happen when they are too stupid to live, but the other side of this is that most MMOs are specifically designed to kill you.

Its the one thing I find lacking in online games as oppose to the pen and paper games I enjoy with my friends. Yeah, Brian is actually out to kill us too, but he’s generally nicer about it so that at least in part its our own damn fault. But in online games, there are so many encounters that get designed to be killers, to the point where playing a game is more of an exercise in triage than an adventure. You can hear it in the uber guilds as they lay out their tactics in which they are actually calculating losses. “When the first tank goes down…” Not IF the tank goes down, WHEN.

To a degree, this is acceptable, when you are leading an army against a god, you should have some fatalities, but this attitude leaks over into groups as well, and sometimes you can even see that it leaks into the developers as they design expansions. Of course, the developers may just be reacting to player tactics.

But, is introducing permanent death and encouraging player fear of death the answer?

Well, yes. But not alone. The best thing about real life is that not everything kills you, even muggers. Sometimes you just get hurt, incapacitated and left alone. This should happen more in games. Why is everything not only out to get me, but wants to kill me and lick my bones clean? Why can’t some of them be happy with knocking me unconsious, stealing my money and leaving me pantsless in the woods?

I think designers really need to get more creative with defeat. Death shouldn’t be the only answer.

In most MMO games today, your character has lots of hit points and you get hit a few dozen times before you go down. In pen & paper systems, your character tends to have lower hit points and depends largely on misses, blocking and resists to survive; getting hit a couple or three times can put you in the dirt. So the question is, which system would you prefer to play in, one where you have hundreds or thousands of hit points and get hit for small amounts often and large amounts infrequently, or one where you have dozens of hit points and get missed mostly and hits are more critical in nature?

To a degree, playing in a large number system is more… calming. I get hit and I shrug it off. I have 5,000 hit points and the monster I’m fighting only hits for 50, so I can get hit 100 times before I fall. Mathematically, it allows for a steady, normalized, progression of damage that leads to character death. With the occasional spike of spell damage to keep you on your toes. However, like other things, I’m a bit tired of this system because it is so prevalent.

The other method is more tense. Miss, miss, miss, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, block, HIT! Crap! I just lost half my hit points! Miss, miss, block, miss, block, block, dodge, miss, miss, dodge, HIT! Almost dead! Not gonna make it! Block, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, miss, miss, miss, dodge, block, enemy falls over dead. Whew! I made it!

I don’t know. It just seems to me that if it worked that second way, I’d care more, I’d be less tempted to do some AFK fighting. What do you think?

One thing I feel is really lacking in pretty much all MMORPGs is actual player skill. With their simplistic auto-attack or even button/click feat based scenarios there is very little room for the player to really control how good their character is at fighting. Even in games like City of Heroes where there isn’t really an auto-attack, your skill is hamstrung by the limitations of the game mechanics, which in CoH is the recharge time and choice/placement of expansion slots.

FPS games are all about skill. Well, except when the game allows scripting/macroing. People who used the rocket-jump scripts in Quake were cheaters in my book, people who did it without a script were talented. But that aside, every player runs the same speed and has access to the same weapons, and what separates the players is how well they use the guns and know the maps.

However, in making combat more skill based, I don’t want to lose the players who actually prefer auto-attack. So consider this…

The default configuration is auto-attack. You equip a sword and run up to the monster and hit attack. Your weapon will do average damage, perhaps with a random chance to score a critical hit and do double damage. This model is enough to play the game. You won’t be the best in the world, but you will do alright. Then, on an option screen, you are able to select several levels of skill based control. For example, you can choose the “fighting style” method which presents your character with a list of pre-set sword grip and fighting styles. Each style has advantages and disadvantages, base-lined on the auto-attack, and you select them and use them. Then on the furthest end of the scale is “complete control” where your joystick controls your sword arm and your keyboard moves your feet, you gain the ability to move the sword in whatever way you choose to hamstring opponents or stab at the eyes, but you also have your damage affected by your movement because “strafing” around a target you’ll have much less power than if you plant your feet and put your whole body into the swing.

It would obviously take alot of effort to work out all the details, but the gist is that you allow the player to decide how much skill they want to use in the game. The less skill they use, the move “average” their character is; the more skill, the more chances for heroics.