Pillars of a Good Game

It's been a while since I last wrote a post here. I just couldn't find a topic I could write about here. But guess what, now I have! And once again, warning, this is very much of a personal point of view/opinion/observation. You may see things differently, and if you do, you're not necessarily wrong about them.

Pillars? What Pillars?

I've been thinking a lot about what really factors into a game, and how these things interact and all that. And in the end, it comes down to three things. Narrative, Aesthetics and Gameplay

The Basics

There's some basic rules for this three pillar system. The most important one is that none of these elements should be badly executed. They should be mediocre at best, because no matter how good one of them is, if another one is bad enough, that won't save the final product. Also, these three elements are not absolute. Depending on the kind of game, their relevance varies. The quality of each pillar is always going to be determined relatively to its importance.

Gameplay

Yes, I know, I put that last in the list, but really, it's kind of important in a game. Gameplay is the interactive part of the game. While it's usually quite important, mediocre gameplay can work if the narrative is good enough. On the other hand, you might just accept a flimsy plot if the gameplay is good enough.

Narrative

Narrative consists of the plot, the characters and the world the game is set in. The relevance of the narrative can vary a lot. Gameplay-related games often just have an excuse plot, because you're supposed to play the game for the gameplay. This doesn't make the narrative bad, since it's supposed to be judged relative to its importance for the game. A good story in a gameplay-driven game is essentially a bonus point that, ideally, makes the game even more fun and enjoyable. A good story in a narrative-driven game, on the other hand, is a must.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is what most people mean when they say graphics. Aesthetics are so misunderstood, Extra Credits made a video. In a nutshell: Aesthetics are not about the objective quality (amount of pixels, polygons and shading filters), but about how everything blends together and how well the end result looks and feels. Also, there's one difference to the other pillars here: Aesthetics cannot carry a game. A game is based on the interactive experience and/or the story it wants to tell. Aesthetics are a bonus point, and bad aesthetics sure can drag it down, as well as lift it up, but there needs to be more to a game than just that.

The Extremes

Of course, there's always people who focus on just one element and completely leave the others in the dust.

Gameplay - I swear, it's fun: Actually, I think it's really hard to mess up a game that only has gameplay. But if you really drop the other elements, you might just end up with something too unappealing to play, even if it would end up being a fun experience. But with these looks and that story, no one's going to touch it with a ten foot pole.

Narrative - go write a book: There can be such a thing as too much plot. This kind of game comes from someone who desperately wants to tell a story, but doesn't really get game design. This is a game you'd rather watch as a Let's Play than play yourself because it gets tedious.

Aesthetics - the spectacle: I would have liked to compare this kind of extreme to a movie, but then again, most movies have plot, too. So it's mostly like a 90s action flick that believes itself to be serious character drama. And for a movie, plotless BS can work. But a game has to be more than that.

Exceptions

As with all things, I'm sure there are exceptions to this, and it's by no way meant to be the ultimate way games work. It's just what I think is a good way to design and also judge games.

The Zombie Table

So apparently zombies are a big thing now. Or were. Or whatever. World War Z is a thing. But when I talked to a friend about it, he said something that I, who has not seen the movie, had suspected already: It's not a zombie movie, it's a movie with zombies. Also, why weren't they already overrunning everying? That made me think about some common zombie features, and what kind of zombie they made when put together.
This list is in no way complete and rather black/white. I'm just showcasing the extremes.

The Traits

Since I'm trying to cover every combination of traits, I'll limit myself to these:

Fast vs. slow: This is kind of a big deal, to the point of sparking discussions about the anatomy of zombies. I don't care about that here, I just care about the speed.

Many vs. few: There's the handful of zombies from a local cursed graveyard, and there's WWZ-style pandemics.

Strong vs. weak: The only thing worse than a fast zombie is a fast zombie that takes a ton of hits. On the other hand, they're kind of brainless meat sacs which may or may not be rotting.

The Table

Fast?	Many?	Strong?	Kind
No	No	No	Wat
No	No	Yes	Teenie-Killer
No	Yes	No	Cannon-Fodder
No	Yes	Yes	The Barrage
Yes	No	No	Thing in the Night
Yes	No	Yes	Thing in the Night That hits you in the Face
Yes	Yes	No	Fast Cannon-Fodder
Yes	Yes	Yes	The Invasion

The Explanation

Yeah, the description above kind of sucks.

Kind: Wat
Threat: Wat.
This is ridiculous. It's what happens when a hobby necromancer decides to dig out some corpses on the local cemetery. They're slow and probably fall apart when you stare at them too hard. Just hit it until it breaks down, or run and get a car to run it over.

Kind: Teenie-Killer
Threat: You should probably get some guns.
They're just as few as the necromancer's experiment, but they don't fall apart easily. You can still run and leave the heroism to the guys with the heavy machinery.

Kind: Cannon-Fodder
Threat: Easily underestimated.
These are Romero zombies. They're slow, so you can still run/drive away, but they are everywhere. While they may not be that strong on their own, there's a lot of them. You can probably gun them down, if you have the ammunition to do so.

Kind: The Barrage
Threat: Not so easily underestimated.
The only thing that saves you from these is their speed. And you probably need heavier machinery to take them out. Just call the military and run.

Kind: The Thing in the Night
Threat: Not so harmless.
Speed is an immense advantage. They may be brittle, and there might not be many of them, but they're fast. They can run after you, so you'd better have that car around somewhere. But then again, once you know how to get a hold of them, they should be easy to deal with.


Kind: The Thing in the Night That hits you in the Face
Threat: Even less harmless.
And now they're not even brittle. They're basically like a group of Generic Alleyway Thugs. Yeah... speed and strength is a bad combo in itself.

Kind: Fast Cannon-Fodder
Threat: This is already an invasion.
Another case of getting the military here. Only that this time, the military should be a bit faster, since the zombies are too. As with all zombies in large groups, this is an invasion, and their speed doesn't make it better. They're bound to get more people in the beginning than their slow counterparts, but at least you can try to beat them up.

Kind: The Invasion
Threat: Nuke the whole site from the orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
These are the worst zombies. They're actually the thing that got me thinking. In the movies, these are the kinds you see in "they won" scenarios. When they attack, you're boned. Don't call the military, they'll only lock down the place and, indeed, throw a bomb on it. And who can blame them?

I left out the whole infection by bite thing, since it would have made things more complicated. Just don't let anything like that bite you.

The Zombie Feel

Back to WWZ not being a zombie movie... I can see it from the trailers. The zombies don't seem threatening on a personal level, and for their abilities (zombiepile on the wall), humanity's quite fine. Because I don't know about you, but the whole "oh god, we could die" thing belongs to a zombie movie. Even if it just features Wat zombies.

Immersion

So I played Digital - A Love Story last night. Not only did I like it, but it also got me thinking about immersion.

I Believe That a Man Can Shoot Fireballs

Immersion is the ability to lose oneself in the fictional world of the medium you're consuming, to be really broad. It's the big thing you want to achieve as a game developer.

Immersion is, however, not based on making it look real. If it was, all games could just throw it out of the window, since you will always have something that's not 100% realistic, especially in terms of graphics. See my post on realism.

Immersion vs Information

I once read a blog post which kind of pissed me off. It was largely a rant on how menus, stats and figures destroyed the immersion. The example was the SNES classic Lufia, and the argument was that the numbers are not part of the world.

Eeeh, I say. Sure, the numbers and interfaces aren't part of the world, but they're part of the gameplay. They tell you how well you do, how much you get stronger and if it's really worth to buy that new shiny piece of armor. Increasing stats and levels show you that you have, indeed, gotten stronger. This is part of the game. And if your immersion is ruined by stats, then, maybe, RPGs are just not your kind of game.

Sure, there is such a thing as too much information. No one wants to fight themselves through tons and tons of stats that may or may not do something.

Perfect Immersion

I realized something: The games with the best immersion possible are the ones where you play a dude in front of a computer. Because then, you are the dude in front of the computer.

As I said, I played Digital last night. It's a game where you are, surprise, a dude in front of a (really old) computer. In the end, I was equally drenched in feels and geeking out over the references. Have I mentioned that you play a dude in front of a really old computer? With dial-up internet (modem sounds are oddly calming to me) and old school BBS. At one part, you could download a patch for your computer's OS that fixed a buffer overflow bug. It actually required you to restart.

Outside of the configuration screen, this game has not broken immersion. And you know why? Because text and stats and menus are the game, so they can't break it.

But not all games are "dude in front of a computer" games. So not all games can go all the way without losing information.

The Filter

The Filter is what makes immersion possible. I'm pretty sure you noticed it before, so I'm going to explain. When you play a game, as you get into it, you kind of see it through a filter. You become immersed in it. I'm speaking for myself here, but I tend to dismiss the UI on the screen when I look at the world. In the context of the game, it's not there, and after a while, you'll be ignoring it. Sure, it's there, and you still look at it for your stats, but somehow, you don't mind. Your brain can do that. It's awesome that way. And this is why an on-screen UI doesn't matter, unless it's so damn huge that it's impossible to ignore.

In-Game Displays

Again, this is subjective, but I have more problems with shoehorned in-game display of stats than with stats in a menu. Because as soon as something's outside the UI, it's part of the game's world. You need an explanation for how it works. You can't just say "HP are a thing now, deal with it" and go on with your business.

The problem with in-game information vs UI information: Many stats and other things are abstractions. Health can't be measured in points. How do you explain ability points? Or levels. All these things are somehow abstracted and meant to be representations and shorthands. Just like toilets are abstracted out of games. And as soon as you put them back into the actual world, you have to think about the logic behind them.

Long story short: I'd rather have a UI that has been thought through than a shoehorned-in in-game thing. Mostly because the latter kills my immersion much more, since it pulls game elements into the world.

Screw Immersion, I'm a Video Game Character

The other way to approach it is to screw immersion and go meta. You know it's a game. And so does everyone else. Expect characters finding out each others' names because they're in the text box, calling you out on your sucky play style and fading to black so that you don't watch them undress, because that would be creepy.

Warning: Meta writing is difficult. Only try it when you're absolutely sure you can do it, as it can quickly be extremely annoying. Also, meta doesn't necessarily mean "cheap fourth wall shattering jokes."

The Bottom Line

Immersion's a difficult thing to achieve. There's various ways to do so, and dropping all UI is only one very limiting way. Remember, immersion isn't (graphical/technical) realism. Immersion is what helps you suspend your disbelief.

Ads on the Internet

Let's talk about ads. They're literally everywhere. You see them on the streets, on TV, they're on the radio and they're even on the internet. They range from memetic to just plain annoying and in your face.

The Background

This isn't an entirely uneducated rant. I'm a curious person, and since a few weeks ago, I'm working in what's called "internet marketing." In layman's terms: Putting those nasty ads on websites. Yes, I'm kind of on the dark side. Also, I'm quite new, so I haven't seen that much of the tech behind it.

Internet marketing involves a lot of douchebaggery. Not against the people who get the ads, but against each other. There's lots of trickery involved as to how you get ads out while at the same time stopping others from having theirs displayed. Also, circumventing ad-blockers. But that shouldn't really be that new to you. It's business, after all.

Why I'm Writing This

I admit, it's largely due to the whole "please don't block our ads" thing that's going on lately. And, no, this is not propaganda. I don't earn money if I get people to turn off their ad-blockers. I earn money for programming. But... these people have a point. They are getting money ("revenue") for each person who watches an ad in their videos.

Who Gets Money?

That said, I'm not all against ad-blockers. It's just about who gets the money. There's lots of free web hosts that put up ads on their customer's pages. These ads don't benefit the owner of the page, they benefit the owner of the web host. Ads like Project Wonderful, or AdSense or however these things are called, are different. They're revenue ads, earning the page owner money for display/clicks. Sure, some of that revenue goes to the ad company itself, but then, that's how they earn their money and allow people to put ads on their pages to earn money.

Ad Myths

Yes, of course there's myths on internet ads. I'm not sure how widespread the things I've heard are, but I've heard them, which means that they go on this list.

All ads are evil: No. That's broad generalization. An ad, in general, is just as evil as the people who provide it. I can only speak for myself here, but the part of the ad chain I'm in does not want people to be redirected to porn sites. That's bad PR and leads to people blocking you because yes, your ads are evil and so are you.
Then, there's technological possibilities. There's ads that are displayed in so-called iframes. They're effectively another page in the current page, so that offers a lot of possibilities for code to be executed. Then, there's ads like the ones  Project Wonderful uses. I don't know what their ad fetch PHP script does, but the ad you eventually get out of it is a picture with a link to the page and a link that lets you advertise in this slot. Sure, you could try to inject malicious code into a picture, but if you're good enough to do that, you should consider earning legal money with that.


You can make it so the blocked ad still counts: That one came up in the Blip discussion. I don't know who said it, but I'd like to ask that person one thing: How would you know that? Aside from this being fraud, technically, how would one know? Stuff like checking if the ad is displayed is usually done deep in the code. If you know how to cheat the ad counter, you have to be really in the know about the code. And if you are, you probably signed an NDA and are thus violating your contract. Have fun.

The people don't get money anyways: I talked about that already. See above.

To Block or Not To Block

There's a few things I block, and a few I don't.
Dubious ad providers - Block: These are the ones that try and redirect you to porn or worse. If you're using one of them for ads, it's your fault, because I sure as hell don't need malware on my computer.
Pop-Ups - Block: I don't care if they're revenue ads or not. Pop-ups are annoying, and if you willingly put one on your site, it's your fault.
Revenue ads - No Block: These are the ads that earn the owners of websites money. They're an indirect way to pay them for their service.

How to Get Unblocked by me

I'll try and unblock people who earn money through ads, but you guys need to help me a bit. Here's the things you should put up somewhere for people to see:

Tell us you get money through these ads: Because if you do, non-douchebag people will be glad to unblock and support you.
Tell us what to whitelist: Most of the time, ads come from some third party ad provider. I, as the person with the ad-blocker, need to know which provider that is. I need an URL to feed to my ad-blocker's whitelist. If you don't know, try to find out. You're allowing someone to embed stuff in your page, so you should know who that somebody is.
Tell us how to whitelist: Not everybody's technologically literate to use ad-blockers past the standard configuration. Link to tutorials, or explain, how to whitelist a page in the most common ad-blockers.

And Finally...

Even though I have name-dropped two companies extensively, I'm not trying to advertise for them. I used Blip as an example because it's a big thing, and Project Wonderful because I had a look at their stuff and it looks good.

And to those who get ad revenue: You're not selling out. You're getting paid, albeit indirectly. And there's nothing wrong with getting paid.

Putting the Crime in the Novel

I'm writing a crime novel. Well, I'm trying. There's still research to be done, details to be figured out and all that. But I'm doing this, and it got me thinking. The cases in these novels have something special. I've singled out a few things I kept stumbling across and thought about them. And since this blog is here for me to ramble, here it comes.

By the way, I'm focusing on police procedural, since that's what I'm intending to write.

The Serial Killer

I swear, I can hear you groan from over there. From the future. Serial killer plots have been done to death and back a few times. They were also the first kind of common plot to come to mind when I started thinking about this. Because even though they're ooold, they still work.
Why does it work? The serial killer is the ultimate clock. After you've found your second victim killed in the same way, with details no one outside the police could know, you know you've got yourself a serial killer. You know they'll strike again, somewhere, some when. While you wish that no more people get killed, each new crime scene could give you the little hint you need to nudge the investigation in the right direction.

The Dead VIP

It's just one victim, but damn if this victim wasn't somehow (in)famous. It doesn't matter if it's a pop star, a local politician or a bank director. The murder itself has most likely been committed out of personal reasons.
Why does it work? Again, there's the clock. This time it's not from the killer, but from outside. It's the higher ups, trying to keep things under the cover, the press, trying to get to the big scandal and the dead person's affiliates. Take too long and the killer's gone forever, and you're up to your head in dirty laundry.

The Controversial Murder

This is a variation on the dead VIP. Again, the focus is on one victim, but this time we're going the hate crime direction.
Why does it work? Like with the dead VIP, the clock is everyone around you. There's going to be debates, double standards and even more dirty laundry. I'm not sure how I should feel about this plot, since it's easy to get into exploitation territory. Also, if you touch on issues, you'd better do your research.

It's Personal

It doesn't matter if it's a serial killer or a regular murderer, but something about this case is linked to the main investigator character. Some share their secret involvement with their colleagues, some don't and do incredibly stupid things.
Why does it work? This time, it's not about a clock. This time it's about stakes. In the examples before, the stakes were vague and purely those of the police force as a whole. In a personal case, there's much more at stake for the main character than the others. That means that your main character needs to be especially compelling. Still, please refrain from throwing reality out of the window. The last time that happened, the investigator kept his relationship to the suspect (his brother, who's also a serial killer at large) and stuck to that decision. I wanted to punch him through the pages for being that stupid.

Besides The Plot

While I'm sure there's enough variations on the aforementioned plot, as well as plots I haven't thought about, there's no completely new plot. Sure, your protagonists are cops, and most of the time, they play by rules. Still, since there's only a bunch of different plots, the biggest difference between all of them is the characters. I only speak for myself here, but I can say that while I remember a few distinct police procedural plots, I've read about more interesting characters than I think I could remember. They're important too, since they're the people we're going to spend a whole book with. Having good characters also makes it possible to turn single books into series. In the end, it's all about the execution. As usual.