Gaming Opus

A note before you begin, this is going to be a looong post.

I am a gamer. This does not define the whole of my existence, but it definitely encompasses a large piece of me. My interaction with games is a major portion of the filter through which I see the world (expect an eventual post on perception filters). The amount of time I spend thinking about games generally leaves me predisposed to seeing the rest of the world in a similar light. What are the rules? How do I win? What is my opponent trying to do? These are questions that I ask myself far more frequently than I think most people consciously do. Before this post turns itself into the tangential discussion of filters let me skew it back in the direction I want to take it: game design. What makes a game good and successful?

In my mind the best game out there is Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I'm going there, please follow (or don't, your loss). Pretty much everyone who reads this is going to know the basics about that game, but just to summarize, Magic is the original collectible card game. It came out in 1993 and literally spawned a genre all of its own. Over 15 years later it is still going strong. It is played around the world with localized versions of the cards made for many countries. It has a professional tour with tournaments that regularly pay out ~$100k in total prizes. At the same time, the vast majority of its players meet casually around the kitchen table.

There are several reasons that Magic is so appealing to such a wide audience, but to my mind the primary reason is their extremely robust design and development process. On the official Magic website (in the links on the right) they have weekly columns written by both the head of Magic design and the various developers. In my experience there is no better window into the creation of a successful game than the weekly columns of Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic. I've actually met Mark a few times (stories and context for another post, gosh, I'm promising a lot of those aren't I) and he is a really smart guy who honestly cares a great deal about his game.

Maro's (MArk ROsewater) columns break down a different aspect of design each week and have been very influential in my understanding of what makes a game tick. I think his greatest contributions have been his articles that define the psychographies of gamers. The three articles that do this Timmy, Johnny, Spike, Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Revisited, and Melvin and Vorthos break down gamers (and people, but more on that in a later article) into three distinct types with two addendums tacked on. Everyone should probably take some time to read those articles, but understanding that most of you wont I'll give brief synopses of each psychography.

Timmy likes big splashy effects. He (/she, but its one less letter to type so I'm sticking with "he" in the gender neutral sense) doesn't care so much about winning as he does about doing something "cool". He'd rather throw 100 Hail Mary passes and be successful on 2 of them then grind out 4 yard runs. It's not that he doesn't want to win, it's that for him, "fun" is defined more by something big and memorable happening. Timmy is the Atlanta Hawk's Josh Smith who tried a between the legs dunk in last night's game. It didn't work, it didn't help them win, but boy would it have been cool if it had. That's the mindset of a pure Timmy.

Johnny wants to show how clever he is. He wants to create the perfect mousetrap. He wants to pull off the play that no one sees coming and then all of a sudden destroys you. He's the A-11 offense in high-school football. He wants to win, but only if he can do so on his own terms. He tries to take the most obscure pieces, put them together and come up with something effective that no one has ever seen before. Of the three I have the least Johnny in me, so I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it well.

Spike just wants to win. For him, winning is fun, losing is not. As Maro's articles state, if he goes 9 for 10 in games he's upset about the one he lost. To borrow from football, if running works, he'll run. If passing works, he'll pass. He'll take an "ugly" 6-3 field goal fest if he's on the 6 side. Al Davis' espoused "Just Win Baby" is his mantra (although Al is really a Timmy pretending to be a Spike). This does not mean that Spike is the best at his game, it just means that he is less constrained than the other two psychographies in the methods he will employ to win a game.

Vorthos and his brother Melvin are less pure psychographies than Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, but for where I'm taking this discussion they're very important. Vorthos cares about the flavor, the fluff, the overarching world in which his game takes place. He calls himself Vorthos because that's the name of his character (14 bard / 6 thief Half Elf I believe). A Vorthos can be a Timmy, Johnny or a Spike, but if he primarily self identifies as a Vorthos its the art, literature and overall world that he most cares about.

Melvin is the opposite end of the spectrum from Vorthos. He cares about the rules and design of his game. The fact that the A-11 offense works in football because it's a punting formation fascinates him. The subtle interplay between rule A and effect B is what gets his juices flowing. The fact that rule C can exist for years, and then game piece P comes into existence, reinforcing the importance of rule C is for him the coolest thing in the world. I have a lot of Melvin in me.

The Magic team's understanding of these different psychographies, and the fact that they took the time define them in the first place, displays a level of effort that is reflected in the product they produce.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Timmy/Spike-Melvin. I love winning, but I'd rather win with a cool flashy effect than by grinding my opponent down. I'd rather see a 45-42 Colts-Patriots game than a 6-3 Steelers-Ravens game. I'd rather my dragon eat your cavalry unit than grind you down with endless basic troopers. And I LOVE the rules, figuring out what they really mean, how that one in a million interaction actually plays out.

Ok, so now that I've explained how I think about games let me move on to explain why Warhammer, the game that I probably spend the most of my time playing, should model itself more after Magic.

The major problem with Warhammer is that the people who make the game, Games Workshop, seem to only employ Johnny/Timmy-Vorthoses. Now, I'm not complaining about this because the game isn't run by my psychography. Rather, I'm complaining because the game is run only by one type of psychography. The beauty of the Magic design and development team is that they design for all the potential types of players. Games Workshop is very obstinate in their view that the game should be played the way they intend it to be played. This is a difficult business model in the first place, but would be mitigated if they weren't such Johnny/Timmy-Vorthoses. The problem with that exact psychography is that it has very little chance of putting out something that appeals to a Spike or a Melvin.

A Spike-Melvin game can appeal to a Johnny, Timmy or Vorthos. That's the beauty of those last three, they'll do most of the work to make something appeal to themselves. Anyone with an imagination and the desire to do so can Vorthos the crap out of anything they are given - just watch a little kid spend more time playing with the big brown packing box than the $200 toy it came in if you want proof. Unfortunately, that kind of trickle down does not work as seamlessly towards Spikes and Melvins.

A Timmy/Johnny designed game is going to include a huge amount of random, cool effects. If it passes the, "is that cool" test, its in. This type of thinking naturally leads to an unbalanced and degenerate game state. Lots of investors thought it would "be cool" to leverage the crap out of their portfolios and put them into CDOs and get huge returns, but unfortunately that did not lead to sustainable growth and the bubble burst. This same type of situation exists in Johnny/Timmy designed games. You get all sorts of cool effects, with little thought put into how they all work together. A Spike is going to comb through the options presented to him, pick the ones that will most reliably allow him to win, and proceed to pummel everyone in sight (Fantasy Daemons). Don't get me started on what Melvins think when they look at rules designed by Johnnys and Timmys.

Further complicating the situation is that Games Workshop (GW) has openly stated that they design their games around kitchen table, "beer & pretzel" type gamers. In other words, people who are just like them and don't want to "compete" in the game, but rather just want to "have fun". Ignoring for the moment that for some people winning is how they "have fun", what this attitude does is eliminates an entire area of business for the game. As I previously alluded to, Magic has a successful Pro Tour. It might not be the primary revenue generator for the game, but it shows a certain professionalism that's important to any game. Because GW takes the attitude that "we don't design a competitive game, don't think of it as such" they're both weakening their product and limiting their business growth.

So what can and should GW do to fix the situation. Well, like any addict, first they have to admit that there's a problem. Fantasy is currently a completely degenerate metagame, and 40k might be heading in that direction. If they admit that there's a problem then they can take steps to fix the situation. They can understand that a game designed for Spikes does not mean that Johnnys and Timmys wont enjoy it, and that a game designed for all three is the best solution. Their design studio needs to hire some Spikey Melvins to go over all the "cool" effects and try and balance them with clearly written rules. Then they need to revitalize the Grand Tournament circuit, at least in the US with clearly defined rules about what type of armies are ok to bring and what aren't, or some other form of balancing to fix the inherently unbalanced state of the game. If GW could do all of these things they would have a much healthier game, and their business would not need to cut back and limit itself as it recently has.

.........

Well, those are my thoughts on game design and specifically as it applies to Magic and GW games. Hopefully, if you've read this far, you have a better sense of how I see things, and maybe have a few new ideas you can incorporate into your own thinking on games and life in general.

Why "Dragon Army"

When pressed I will always state that my favorite book is Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game". No one (at least that I've met) is as smart as Ender, but when I first read that book I definitely identified with him, not to mention the idea of the Battle Room and a school of all smart kids seemed totally awesome. Dragon Army is the Battle School army they give Ender. It's a collection of seeming misfits that Ender is able to mold into the greatest fighting force in the history of the school. I'm just a big enough goober that that idea appeals to me in ways I can't really describe.

So, when wracking my brain for a blog title Dragon Army seemed like a great fit. My thoughts are totally mismatched but when you put them all together the result is (I hope) greater than the sum of the parts. Plus dragons are inherently cool*, armies are inherently cool*, and so the combination of the two is inherently cool*.

Thus, the blog is and always will be titled Dragon Army.

*"cool" here is used not in the "captain of the football team" manner, but rather in the "dragons are cool" manner

Basic Defense

This will be a quick aside before all the rest of the posts that I have to make today.

I was talking with my dad during game 4 of the Bulls - Celtics round one series, and we were both really enjoying the game. That said, at the end of overtime, Paul Pierce ran the exact same play three possessions in a row. He had the ball at the top of the 3-point arc, and all 4 other Celtics cleared out, spreading the Bull's D. Salmons guarded Pierce on each play, and on each play Pierce slow-dribbled to the top right of the key and nailed a semi-contested jumper.

After the first time this play worked (and remembering back to all of last season's play-offs, when he this was the exact play he used to KILL the Lakers) I was screaming at the TV for the Bulls to send another wing defender at Pierce. Ray Allen had fouled out, and there was literally no one else on the court for the Celtics who could hit a long range shot. Run the right hand wing defender at Pierce, get good rotation and you're set. Nope, Vinny-I'm-the-weakest-link-DelNegro allowed the same play to beat his team three tries in a row. On a team built with long, rangy, fast defenders, this is unacceptable. In a series they should absolutely be able to win I really hope the Bull's inability to defend an extremely basic play doesn't cost them the "upset".

A quick aside (or, notes on reading)

As I said in my first post, this blog is going to be written in stream of semi-stream-of-consciousness. I'll kinda-sorta-almost check for grammar, and I will run spell check. That said, I'm not an English major. I read old, dead, white guys and loved them for their ideas, not for the technical proficiency of their language. That idea is what will guide my posts. I will mistake its and it's. I will stop and think of my mother every time I write one or the other, but sometimes my brain gets ahead of my fingers and it's will replace its. I promise, if I stopped and thought about it I would get it right. But I don't want to stop and think about that. This is going to be fun for me, and no grammar nazi will take that away!

Rhetoric and Poetry

A topic I've been thinking about for a few years now is the different nature of football and basketball, and how best to describe the two sports to newcomers. I've always found that a good analogy is the best five-second answer to any question. As much as the rules of a game might interest me, most people's eyes start to glaze over three seconds into a dissertation on "ineligible receiver down field" or when it's legal to hand check someone (although everyone loves "illegal touching" and "acts unnatural to the game"). So, in striving to find the best analogy for explaining football and basketball to a novice I've settled (for the moment) on the following: football is rhetoric, basketball is poetry.

In football each game is comprised of strictly delineated instances of confrontation between the two teams - the plays. Each play has a set start and end, there is preparation before each play, and in each play both teams have a clearly defined set of actions that they intend to engage in. Furthermore, the preparation that goes into each game is intense and rigorous. You have to study your opponent, learn his proclivities and the best counters to those tendencies. Just as in a debate you should know what your opponent is going to say before he says it, so too in football should you know what your opponent is going to do before the ball is even snapped. This clearly defined structure, to me, makes football a little simpler (if not necessarily easier - and there's a distinction that's worth it's own post) to explain to a new comer. It is possible to chart out many of the basic formations, describe each individual players role, and show a few sample plays all on the back of a piece of scratch paper. The fact that a guard is (almost) always going to block, a quarterback going to throw, a running back going to run and a receiver going to catch makes it easy to understand the surface level of what's going on at any given moment.

Additionally, the stoppages between each play gives the teacher an opportunity to describe what just happened. With the miracle of DVRs you can rewind (if your pupil is really that interested) and break down each play immediately after it happens. This iterative process lends itself to explanation. It shouldn't take too long for the seemingly random movements of players to fall into recognizable patterns (a run play looks different from a pass play), and so a new comer can quickly get a sense of familiarity.

Thus, football and rhetoric. Two media with clearly defined rules of engagement and strict structures that lend themselves to rational explanation.

Basketball is a more free-form style of expression, hence poetry. Whereas football proceeds from A to B to C in a (generally) linear sense, a basketball game can seemingly move from A to D, back to B and then on to E with little discernible pause. Yes, most of the time a point guard dribbles the ball up the court, and the center is almost always the tallest guy (sorry ladies - women's sports is another dissertation post) on the court, there are many cases where that's just not the case. Unfortunately for the sake of explanation, there are situations where a team will have 2 "centers" or 4 guards all on the court at the same time.

Also, instead of the highly structured, 700 page long football play books, basketball "plays" are much more ephemeral. Sure, there's the "Princeton Offense", the "Triangle Offense", the "high screen", but like the Pirate Code, these are more like guidelines than real laws. There's nothing remotely as structured as football's "X-Right, 21-Blast, Z-Seam, Shimmy on 3". I can explain that a sonnet has 14 lines with a strict rhyming structure, but that doesn't come close to encompassing the meaning and the beauty that Shakespeare can get out of that structure. So too can I explain that a back-door play involves dribbling at a teammates defender, forcing him to commit and turn his head and then passing to your teammate running to the rim behind him, that explanation doesn't do justice to the artistry of the real thing.

Further complicating it is that fact that there are very few natural stoppages in play in basketball. Whereas you get as much as 45 seconds to explain each football play after it happens, there is a maximum of 5 seconds between each play in basketball, and often (and in my opinion at the best of times) each play will flow seamlessly into the next.

All this being said, I don't want to make it sound like one is better than the other. Both rhetoric and poetry have important places in our lives; they just touch different parts of us.

In a great rhetorical argument both sides come prepared, passionately believe in their points and are willing to listen to their opposition, and adjust their argument as the discussion progresses. Each side comes out knowing more about their point, and the mind is enhanced because of it. A good football game is the same. Both sides come in prepared with a game plan. Each play is a test of that plan against the oppositions and the best combination of plan (idea) and execution (language employed) wins the day.

Great poetry is more challenging to define. Sure it has it's central theme, but the deviations from that theme can be the most touching parts of the entire experience. It has a structure, but the expressions allowed within that structure can be almost limitless, and when they surprise us is when they are the most moving. I can know that a game comes down to whether you can force my best player into a contested 22 foot shot, but when Michael Jordan, with 41.9 seconds left on the clock, Bulls down by 3 in game 6 of the '98 finals can will his team to victory... well, I still get goose bumps.

Beating the point long after everyone has stopped reading this, I think that's why I tend to like football on a more consistent basis. An average debate is still going to have decent points, and as long as the topic is interesting it's (almost) always worth hearing people's opinions. On the other hand, bad poetry is just bad. Fortunately (or un- depending on how pessimistic you are), my formative years in basketball were spent watching Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time. It's the poetic equivalent of skipping limericks and moving straight into epic verse, or moving straight from teeny pop music to Bach and Beethoven. There are some luminaries at the moment, Kobe, LeBron, D-Wade, CP3 can all touch upon transcendence, but having watched someone live in the light, the shadows on the cave wall can be tough to see.

To sum up, football touches the mind and so I can more easily explain it. Basketball touches the soul and so must be experienced to be understood.

Alea Iacta Est

They say that everyone who runs for President has at some point looked in the mirror and said, "I should be the most powerful person [edited for sexual equality] in the world." In my mind the equivalent statement for bloggers is, "My thoughts are worth sharing."

With that guiding principle in mind, I have brought Dragon Army into the world. I will share my thoughts on anything and everything that I find interesting, whether it be current events, sports, entertainment, or any of what I will broadly deem "Billy's Hobbies". I will write both long winded expositions and snarky quick hitters. The long term plan is to maintain this space as long as possible - we'll see how I do with that. Ideally I will post several times a day, but no promises.

The links sections will be very useful to see where I'm getting the material for my posts - they're my filter to what's going on in the world. As you can see, it's a pretty eclectic set of topics, but then I'm just that interesting of a person (riiiiiight). Expect a just-above-stream-of-conciousness level to my writing. I have never desired to be an English Major, so grammar will be spotty at best. In fact, I'm sure I've screwed up several things already. I love parenthetical asides (I like to think it's because I'm constantly finding relationships between and among my thoughts, its probably just that I'm lazy) so expect those too.

Finally, any introduction should really include a Crash Davis homage, so here's mine:

"I believe in the soul, the mind, the brain, the majesty of Mankind, good beer, cheap beer, that the novels of George R.R. Martin are the best currently being written (Finish the Book George!), I believe that the '91 Bulls would have beaten the '86 Celtics. I believe that there ought to be a Constitutional amendment banning idiots from voting (and astroturf). I believe in good game design, Platonism, self interest rightly understood, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. Cya soon!"