The Quixotic Engineer

Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas‘s family cottage in northern Ontario. I relished the opportunity to disconnect for a while and enjoy the long weekend without the usual digital distractions. The cottage procedure prescribes reading, swimming, fishing and cooking. After the sun goes down, the card games come out: Hearts and Cribbage are local favourites.

However, this year we were joined by my good friend Sven, an Antiguan foreign student who just graduated from software engineering at Concordia with me. He brought a set of dominoes with him, and thought we might enjoy learning a Caribbean game he had grown up playing. He knew the game only as “Dominoes”, but a little post-trip research revealed it’s commonly known as “Cut Throat”.

Cut Throat derives a great deal of strategic complexity from a very simple ruleset. The game begins by dealing the 28 dominoes evenly to four players. The goal is to be first player to empty their hand. The winner of the previous hand (or the owner of the double 6 tile) plays first, then play proceeds clockwise around the table. A player can only play a domino with an end that matches one of the two open ends of play (there is no branching). If no moves are possible, knocking the table indicates that you are unable to play. In the rare event where no one is able to play, the hand is shut and the player with the fewest total dots in their hand is the winner. The first player to win six hands wins the game provided (here’s the catch) another player has won zero hands.

As a game designer, Cut Throat utterly fascinates me, and not only because it is elegantly simple and a real joy to play. It has certain unusual characteristics that make it unlike any game I’ve ever played, and I have a hypothesis regarding why that might be. Video game bloggers have long discussed how Japanese and American games have distinct regional flavours. If we consider games as cultural artifacts, then logically their mechanics will reflect such roots. Despite my extremely limited knowledge of the region, I’d like to propose the following: that Cut Throat’s unusual characteristics, which distinguish it from more common tabletop games, may be an expression of Caribbean culture.

Despite its simple ruleset, Cut Throat has a rather complex colloquial vocabulary. Of course, it’s not uncommon for unique ad-hoc language to emerge from game communities (the fighting genre in particular). However, the terms in Cut Throat are used less to describe rudimentary mechanics and more to add flavour and commentary to the game. They enhance the experience, rather than merely describe it. Here are a few examples:

• Lie down: To play a double. Since you haven’t changed the state of the board, you haven’t done any work!
• Jail: A player is in jail until he wins a hand. The goal of the game is effectively to keep at least one player in jail.

• Pushing: You are pushing the player to your left. Since you play right before her, you have the most control over how she plays. If you’re making it difficult for her to play, then you are pushing hard.
• Strong Back: Conversely, if you’re being pushed hard but are still able to play then your back is strong.
• Buoy: The player you are pushing is also your buoy. If he gets out of jail, then your buoy has floated away!
• Running From: A player will run from numbers they are unable to play on. For instance, a player with no fours in their hand is running from fours.
• Wash up: To shuffle the dominoes.
• Eat Your End: Late in the game, it’s possible that there’s a tile that only you can play on. This is clearly a very advantageous situation. If you’re forced to play on this end, then you eat your end and negate your advantage.
• Anti-man: At the end of the game, there is one winning player (who won six times) and at least one jailed player (who never won). If the winning player was also pushing a jailed player, then he has played an exceptionally good game. The losing player is then referred to as the anti-man, a slur for homosexual men¹.

Cut Throat is a high competitive and energetic game. Indeed, players are encouraged to slam their dominoes on the table if they’re playing well. This aspect of the game is enhanced by this unique vocabulary; with the explanation of each term, Sven described an accompanying emotion. Lying down is cheeky, losing your buoy is stressful, escaping from jail is relieving, and being anti-manned is very shameful. “Washing up” is delegated to the player who was pushing the winner of the hand, because they evidently failed to push hard enough. Furthermore, winning players are permitted to draw from the shuffled pile before those in jail. In Cut Throat, friendly taunting is not only encouraged, it’s intrinsically built into the structure of the game.

Cut Throat has the strongest positive feedback of any game I’ve ever encountered². You may have noticed, for instance, that the winning player gains an advantage by playing first. However, there is a unique social mechanic that is far more influential. As I described earlier, the game ends in a draw if all four players have won at least once. In order for there to be a winner, there must also be a loser. Therefore, it’s common for the three players with at least one win to conspire to beat the final jailed man. In other words, they team up against the player in last place! This mechanic subverts one of the most fundamental strategies of all multiplayer games: playing to beat the player in first place.

In conclusion, Western and Japanese games tend to include some form of consolation to weaker players, often in the form of negative feedback. They certainly never stack the odds against the weakest player, then proceed to mock him for it. With its extremely strong positive feedback and institutionalized taunting, Cut Throat unabashedly offends these sensibilities. I suspect that this divergence in game design philosophy can be at least partially attributed to cultural differences. The uniqueness of Cut Throat may be an expression of its Caribbean roots. As video game studios continue to pop up all over the world, what new game design paradigms will be revealed?

¹ Homophobia is extremely prevalent in the Caribbean.
² For a quick primer on feedback loops in game design, check out Game Design Concepts.

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

In his rant, Chris expresses concern about the fixation on short development time. He worries that rapid-fire game releases (exemplified by Jonatan “Cactusquid” Söderström) have become a “badge of honour” in the indie game community. This attitude is mirrored in the industry, where ship dates often trump quality. Chris asserts that, in terms of contribution to games as an art form, Braid is worth more than 100 game jam games because it explored its mechanics to the depth that they deserved. “We need more depth and understanding”, he says. “We don’t need more wacky ideas or shallow games.”

I have great respect for Chris (I loved his talk at MIGS 2009) and thus am cautious about disagreeing with him. However, I believe his argument overlooks the real value of rapid development and its place in the creative ecosystem¹. I think that it’s misleading to compare a masterpiece like Braid with the multitudes of forgettable unpolished jam games. The final product isn’t the point; the value of a game jam lies in the process of creation. Specifically, game jams provide tools that enable amateur game designers to experiment, learn and grow.

Anecdotal evidence suggest that there are a great many people who are interested in making games, but have never done so. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that to start making games, you have to make your first game. There’s tremendous symbolic and psychological value to doing something for the first time, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. As Havi Brooks explains, doing what you love can be terrifying:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment. [...] It’s not this: “Even though I thought this meant everything to me, I’m still avoiding it so clearly I don’t really care about it.” It’s this: “Wow, this means everything to me… so of course I’m avoiding it.”

Game jams provide tools to help overcome this pressure. For instance, they establish a well-defined start and end date for the project. They provide a theme to riff off. Fellow jammers can provide assistance and feedback. Finally, knowing that you’ll release a game concurrently with dozens of others reduces its symbolic value. Simply put, game jams provide a friendly supportive atmosphere for newcomers.

Those who do take the leap and make their first game quickly run into another problem: they don’t like what they’re making. After all, if you care about games enough to try your hand at making one, then your taste in games is likely quite advanced. You’re perceptive enough to know that what you’re making isn’t very good. Ira Glass explains why this is problematic: “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. [...] A lot of people never get past that phase.”

Fortunately, he also presents a method of getting past this roadblock: “The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one [game].” In other words, do exactly what people like Cactusquid and the Experimental Gameplay Project are already doing! Experiment with weird genres, unusual aesthetics and unfamiliar technologies. Create exactly the kind of unfinished shallow games that Chris Hecker is warning us against. Why? Because nobody can create a masterpiece without first making a hundred crude sketches.

In a general sense, I worry that the burden of having to develop mechanics deeply will dissuade people from making games. If it is “our duty as developers to follow a mechanic to its logical and aesthetic extent”, then the inverse is also true; we should not make a game if we cannot give its mechanics their due diligence. This encourages designers to hold onto their ideas, waiting until they have the time to execute them with the appropriate fidelity. To quote Ze Frank: “If you don’t want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do them right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack.” This attitude is anathema to amateur game development. It’s better to get those ideas out there, even if they’re flawed and incomplete!

If we embrace this sort of flawed rapid development, do we then disregard the notion of exploring mechanics to the depth that they deserve? I don’t believe we have to. As Cactus observed in an e-mail discussion with Chris, “it’s hard to decide if the game you’re working on really deserves that much hard work or not.” Creating these crude unfinished games is a form of prototyping; ideas that seem promising can be developed further². Chris himself did this with Spy Party:

SpyParty was actually an idea from Indie Game Jam 4 that I didn’t quite get working at the jam, but that I felt was strong enough to spend (a lot) more time on.

In conclusion, while I appreciate that “the good-enough is the enemy of the excellent”, I think the onus of developing mechanics fully is detrimental to amateur game development. Creating wacky, shallow games plays a valuable part in building up new developers. Attracting fresh voices and perspectives is the surest route to expanding games as an art form and creating more masterpieces like Braid. Don’t worry too much about greatness, just get excited and make things!

¹ I feel a bit sheepish saying this to one of the founders of the Indie Game Jam.
² This may have been Chris’ point all along: too few developers are following through in this manner.

Back in January, Henk, Thomas and I presented two games we were working on (Norwegian Wood and an alpha build of Pax Britannica) to the DemoCamp at CUSEC 2010. DemoCamp is a really cool informal event where programmers can show off what they’ve been hacking on. The rules are simple: 15 minutes maximum, no powerpoint, show working code!

I think the talk went really well, we got by with some laughs and a little bit of casual swearing. Big thanks to the CUSEC organizers, host Joey DeVilla and A/V tech Guillaume Theoret for giving us a chance to show off our games!

These past few weeks I’ve been fighting a pitched interstellar war against fellow game bloggers Matthew Burns, Ben Abraham and Michel McBride-Charpentier. Early in the game I had a long-standing alliance with Ben, and we peacefully teamed-up to take out our red neighbour “Dr Dinosaur”. I sold weapon technology to Matthew in his distant campaign against Michel, who was the winning player at the time. As I rallied my troops on my Eastern border to confront the next enemy, Ben and Matthew launched a treacherous surprise attack on my unprotected plank. I’m making a last stand on four planets now, while Ben and Matthew turn on each other for complete control of the galaxy.

Neptune’s Pride is a browser-based multiplayer strategy game that falls somewhere between Galactic Civilizations and Risk. Eight empires fight to be first to conquer half of the galaxy’s ~180 stars. While the game ostensibly progresses in real-time, moving a fleet from one planet to another takes about 16 hours (before speed upgrades) and your economy only produces funds once a day. Thus players only need to check the game a few times a day, a style sometimes referred to as “sporadic play”.

What’s even more interesting about Neptune’s Pride is the high level of strategic abstraction, closer to a board game than a video game. There is only one type of fighter ship and one currency. Planets can be developed for economy, industry or science. Science slowly improves fleet weapons, speed, range or scanning. The diplomatic options are equally stark: players can message each other (privately or publicly) and send resources/technology. This means that there are no game mechanics governing alliances, trades, borders, etc. Interstellar relations are therefore forged on trust, cunning and strategic treachery. Playing with friends adds an extra dimension of political deviousness: are they going to check Neptune’s Pride before going to bed, or can I launch a sneak attack overnight?

While my performance in the last match was nothing to brag about, I feel I’ve mastered Neptune’s Pride sufficiently to impart some wisdom to new players.

Firstly, understand how the combat system works. There are no random elements or dice rolls in Neptune’s Pride. The defender always strikes first, and kills a number of enemy ships equal to their weapon tech level plus one. The attacker then kills a number of enemy ships equal to their natural weapon tech. This goes back and forth until one side runs out of ships. There’s therefore no need to guess the outcome of a battle; you can compute the results beforehand, and only commit if the outcome is favourable.

Remember that the defender has a double bonus: first strike and extra weapon damage. Use this to your advantage! Try to leave a one ship garrison on every planet you own. If the enemy tries to land there, they’ll lose 5+ ships and you’ll only lose one. This kind of attrition can really slow a raiding party.

The four technology upgrades are not equal in worth. Namely, the range upgrade isn’t very good. Early in the game it can be handy to throw a level or two into range in order to reach outlying stars or save travel time by cutting across diagonals. You might assume that later on it would also be handy to blitzkrieg your way behind enemy lines. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If the enemy can see your fleet, he or she can also see its destination. Your opponent will have plenty of time to organize their defences for your arrival. Your upgrade time is better spent on weapons, speed and occasionally scanning.

On the topic of science upgrades, I learned the hard way that it isn’t worth being the tech leader. At the height of my empire, I had invested in 5 more scientific research facilities than any other player. However, I only had a negligible advantage in terms of fleet technology. The reason was that other players were more pro-actively trading technologies. They were therefore upgrading their fleets at a fraction of the cost and nullifying my advantage. It’s simply more strategic to barter, even at the risk of arming your enemies.

Those are all the strategic revelations that I managed to gleam from my one and a half games of Neptune’s Pride (you might also learn a thing or two from Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s play diary). If you’re interested in giving the game a go yourself, I highly recommend dragging a friend or two along for the match. I’ll be sure to put out a call on Twitter for the next campaign!

No Fun Games is proud to present Pax Britannica, a one-button real-time strategy game we made for the GAMMA4 design competition. Our team includes designers/programmers Henk Boom, Renaud Bédard and me, artist Daniel Burton and composer Ben Abraham. Unfortunately we were not selected and will not be showing off our game at GDC. However, we had a great time making the game and I’m glad we finally get to release it to the public!

Windows Download

Coming Soon

The game was designed for 1-4 Xbox 360 controllers hooked up to a PC (the keyboard controls are A-F-H-L). Holding down the button spins the needle on the radial menu in the middle of the player’s factory ship. The needle will only travel as far as the player’s current resources allow. Releasing the button creates a ship that corresponds to the quadrant that the needle is pointing at: fighter, bomber, frigate, or a factory ship upgrade. Ships you spawn fight automatically using the latest in artificial aquatelligence technology. The player who keeps their factory ship alive wins!

We had been hoping to fix a few things for an official release, but the game has been “out there” on TIGSource for a few weeks now. In fact, we’re thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve gotten! Pax Britannica has been picked up by the Indie Games Weblog, Bytejacker, PlayThisThing, and GayGamer. Furthermore, Darius Kazemi made this awesome video review:

Enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.