Geoff’s post on the ending to the latest Prince of Persia brought to mind some recent (disjointed) thoughts on agency in games.  What can the player do?  Why is the player there?

Games have responded to that question with a wide range of responses: from the pathologically linear Out of This World/Another World (or more extreme, Dragon’s Lair), to “choose your own solution” games like Deus Ex, to the reactive and interactive worlds seen in Ultimas and GTAs, to player-centeric and play-focused games such as The Sims.  Is the player acting out your pre-set script, or do they have the power to substantially affect the experience?

Some of the most effective, recent indie game statements have been about the futility of agency– Passage, The Graveyard, La La Land 5.  You appear to have power, but that power is meaningless. In some ways, the games say: “We have this new medium, but we’re not sure what we can do with it.”

How do we measure agency?  How do we better distinguish the player’s low level abilities, such as performing a flip in SSX, from the higher-level power to affect the game world, or the state of an NPC?

It’s layoff time!  Not a great time to be a game developer, and Scott’s count is only the stuff from the last couple days, so doesn’t include Mythic, Funcom, Austin, or the next couple months at EA, who’s just starting their plan to trim 10% by March.

EA’s costs have recently skyrocketed across the board (development, marketing, admin), without much to show for it, at least yet.  The cuts aren’t surprising, but they are unfortunate.

The industry historically goes from “develop everything internally” to “buy external startups” and back again.  Will EA shift again?  With modern console dev costs, are there enough studios left for that to work?

I was just chatting with a friend about how I’d never once consciously tried to get an “achievement”.  I’ve always been an exploration player, never a score player– I could care less if I have 600/1000 or 800/1000 for Mass Effect, or if I have all my Azeroth achievements unlocked on my Death Knight (unless it gives me a faster mount).

Days later, I stumbled across Achievement Unlocked, which turned me into a bona fide achievement whore.  I absolutely had to get every last achievement.  What’s the difference?  For starters, the achievements are all listed along the right-hand side of the screen, with obvious indicators of which ones you have and haven’t completed.  There’s no hunting for your next goal: there’s a list of ‘em right there.

Also, many of the achievements require a bit of cleverness, especially if you try to figure them out without reading the hints.  (Note: there’s one achievement you can’t get without reading the hints– namely, the achievement for reading the hints.)  So, there is gameplay in many of the achievements, even if the game is ostensibly trying to show how achievements detract from gameplay.

But what about the obviously gameplay-free ones, such as the achievement for jumping for 10 seconds?  I still completed those.  Why?  Logically, I could clearly see that jumping for 10 seconds would complete the achievement, and that that would complete my 100% achievement.  Maybe I’m not as immune to completionism as I thought.

The top-selling XBLA games of 2008 are right here.  The top 4 are IPs that originated in the downloadable game format (XBLA exclusive, or XBLA+PSN): Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars 2, Braid, and a Kingdom for Keflings.  It’s extremely promising news for the platform, as long as the new IPs can survive Microsoft’s royalty cuts.

This late entry is stiff competition for game of 2008 (against You Have to Burn the Rope, of course).  It’s hard to discuss it without ruining it, so… just check it out.  It’s more than worth the 5 minutes.

And yeah, it took me a couple weeks to actually getting around to playing it.  Downloading games is hard.  But don’t trust me, trust Mr. Koster.

37 hours, 45 minutes, with normal play (no crazy powerleveling, items/cash sent from an alt, etc.).  Even with 55-58 being pretty quick gimmes, that’s less than 3 hours a level.  Leveling time basically ramped up from 55 until 68, then ramped down for 69-70.  (And then 70-71 was dreadful.)

The leveling was over about 37 days, so I think that average shows an admirable amount of restraint on my part.

GamesIndustry.biz managed to out-repugnant the usual press release.

Redundancies hit Turbine following latest launch

Lord of the Rings Online developer Turbine has made a number of staff redundant at both its Massachusetts and California studios.

GamesIndustry.biz understands that the positions were in QA and Account Management.

[More solid gold BS]

First of all, how do your QA and customer service staff become redundant, unless you’re making fewer games, and attracting fewer customers?  Unless you’re planning to make shoddier games, and hence fulfill the second condition.  Did they just get their programmers to promise to stop writing buggy code?  Because I don’t think that’s a promise they can keep.

Second, “redundancies hit Turbine”?  I’d make fun of that if I could parse it.

This proves that writing such copy really is a permanent character defect.  They don’t even have to cover anything up!  We get it– the economy sucks.  You’re cutting back.  Yes, it will affect future development.  No, you’re not “adjusting” your “resources”.  Turbine– you’re a good company!  You make some sweet games!  Don’t do this.

P.S.  And since my recent posts have been overly negative, here’s a funny picture of a monkey.

Keiichi Yano, chief creative officer on XBox karaoke game Lips, discussing how the game would handle importing players’ own music collections:

No word on how they’ll implement lyrics or a beat chart for the songs, though Yanno promised it would be “very, very compelling.”

How “very, very compelling” worked out:

The gameplay with imported songs doesn’t provide as good of a karaoke experience, because you won’t have lyrics to sing along nor will the songs have displayed pitch “tubes” to help you on unfamiliar passages.

Four of my blog’s top 5 search terms:

• fable 2 detailed map
• fable 2 maps
• fable 2 map
• fable 2 world map

Oops.  (Oh, btw: it’s here.)

Yet Another Warlock Nerf has posted a great summary of the major patches.  As the author, Horns, put it:

Can you imagine WoW today without daily quests? Without guild banks, flying mounts or Biscuits? Remember the days when warlock and hunter pets followed us on the ground while we were flying, when there weren’t any battlegrounds or arenas? When warlocks could beat rogues, when quest givers didn’t show up on our minimaps? When meeting stones served as a sort-of LFG tool, when I spoiled the entire post by giving you a summary at the beginning?

It’s a must-read for any WoW fan.  He excluded class changes, calling them the least significant.  (I agree with the approach for a different reason: I think they merit their own, in-depth post.)  The post shows the difficulty of going head to head with WoW– look at what they’ve managed to add since release.  But Blizzard’s learning process is also exposed, with several less-than-successful stabs at some thorny issues.  (Does anyone use the in-game voice support?  Or the LFG tool?)

One of my favorite things about MMOs is the exposed design process.  Designers encounter the most exacting balance standards ever, in a post-release setting with thousands/millions of players, and we get to watch the successes and failures.