A simple model for measuring skill ceilings in video games

If I was not already doing a PhD in AI and Games Design, I think I would most likely gravitate towards something along the lines of player skill in games. It is a topic that for some reason I am quite fond of, not because I consider myself to be all that skillful in games (really only a select few), but more because I feel it is a very important topic for game designers to understand. In my opinion, making a game that tailors towards skillful play can only be done if you have at some point been a skillful player in something. I am not talking about beating your friends a few times in a random game at a LAN. I mean actually being good, and interested in being good, at a game, even if it is just from a theory-crafting or spectator point of view. When you realise that skill in a game is often more than just mastering the basic mechanics of the genre, you can begin to see that skill is often much more complicated and harder to define than previously thought. High skill in one game does not automatically mean high skill in another, and games that, to the casual observer, may seem simple, mindless or even primitive may in fact have more skill than any of the other games in the genre.

Lately, and usually the cause of most of my rants on this blog, I have had conversations with people I did not wholeheartedly agree with. To simplify, I felt they were somewhat wrong. Or perhaps just ignorant. It is hard to tell. My impression was that they had never been at a stage where they could comfortably describe themselves as skillful at or even knowledgeable about a game, even from a meta/external level. To me, this has skewed their perspective of what skill actually is in games. Particularly, it had deformed their idea of what a 'skill ceiling' should be in a game. I got the impression that they thought the actions you perform in one game take the same amount of skill and are used in the exact same way in another game of the same genre. This is an incredible misunderstanding and a terrible oversimplification of determining the skill ceiling of a game. Even the simple act of pressing a button in response to an event can be drastically different conditionally from one game to another. To describe something like 'aiming' in an FPS game as a generic action, unvarying in skill in all FPS games, is like saying that boxers all just throw the same weighted punches at each other. I hate to burst your bubble guys, but depending on the weight/style of boxing, certain boxers will punch harder and faster than others. The same can be said of skill in video games.

I have beaten around the bush concerning skill in video games before. Once I mentioned skill having a physical/mechanical execution process to it. That's one part of it. In this post, once and for all, and for the benefit of 'grading' possible games in the future from a 'skill ceiling' perspective, I will introduce to you the rest of my model. Academically, this model does not incorporate much, if any of the minor research I have found around this topic. There really is very little. Instead, it is more of my own opinion on the components that define skill in video games. It is therefore subject to change and open to suggestion.

The skill level capable in video games can not simply be described as any one thing. It can more correctly be viewed as a combination of interrelated, similar but separate actions/processes that players are capable of executing while playing a game. In my opinion, these action/processes are the following:

Tactical thinking - having or developing a strategy to counter your opponent
Example: saving a powerup, unit or cooldown for use at a more opportune or unexpected moment

Multi-tasking - a player's ability to perform seperate but useful actions or observations that are of benefit to their current game state
Example: queueing up unit production, observing your resources and moving soldiers to the front line

Mechanical Dexterity - the physical speed, precision, timing and variety of input allowed to and required by players to be sucessful
Example: pulling off a tricky combination of moves in a fighting game

Threat Assessment - a player's ability to quickly assess a situation in game and respond to it in a useful or beneficial way
Example: realising your opponent will defeat you for X reasons during your next encounter in an FPS, and fleeing from the encounter temporarily

Prior knowledge, memory or experience - a player's long term and short term memory regarding specifics of both the game and the ongoing events in it.
Example: Details about enemy specifics or recollection of opponent traits, patterns and weaknesses all fall into this category

A skillful game may not necessarily have all 5 of these components. It is entirely possible that a game can have only a few of the components, but in a high enough concentration for it to still be viewed as a skillful game as a whole. An excellent example of this would be chess, requiring high amounts of Tactical Thinking and Prior Knowledge from players, but almost nil of anything else. What you may have noticed, and what was previously mentioned, is that many of these skill components have areas where they will undoubtedly overlap. Your Prior Knowledge will greatly affect your Tactical Thinking, as will your current assessment of threat. Your prior Knowledge will also determine your ability to perform actions, contributing to your level of Mechanical Dexterity. Both Mechanical Dexterity and Multi-tasking go hand in hand, the ability to do one assisting the ability to do another, but they are still inherently different. Maintaining a balanced economy in a strategy game (multi-tasking) is not the same as your ability to pull off a combo in a fighting game (mechanical dexterity), but the result from one will affect the other. In that regard, your ability to multi-task does affect your ability to assess threat. The faster you take into account all the variables which define your safety in a situation, the more efficiently you can make a helpful threat assessment. The relationships between these components can be seen in the figure below.


There is something missing though, and its a big one. A constant, unstoppable variable that without consideration, skill in video games would be non-existant. That variable is, quite simply, time. Unless you are playing a game with potentially unlimited time, such as a turn based game like chess, time can drastically affect how significant each of these components become, especially if left unchecked. Time defines how intense each of these components actually are, and is the most crucial element for truly understanding how high a skill ceiling a game can possess. Allow me to explain.

Three seconds. Just three seconds of game play. Imagine, for three seconds, you are playing Starcraft 2. In those 3 seconds you performed the following: queued up another worker, checked to see if your new unit was almost done, checked the mini-map for enemy dots and started selecting a group of units. In this time you applied 4/5 of the components of the prior model to a semi-intense degree. The only thing you did not do was change your existing strategy via Tactical Thinking, whatever that strategy was. Now imagine, for three seconds, you are playing Modern Warfare 3. In those 3 seconds, you reloaded your gun while crouching behind a chest high wall. In this case you probably applied at most two of the components, though to a much less degree. Both of these scenarios can be described as passive, non-action filled scenarios where you simply performed actions typically required of a player prior to engaging in combat. One, however, had a lot more skill to it than the other.

I know what you are thinking. How about when they are in combat? What happens to skill levels then? Obviously both would spike, possibly even firing components that were inactive in the described 3 seconds. It may even be possible that elements of MW3 would even exceed that of SC2, for a brief moment in time. Because of this, it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure the skill ceiling provided by games using random 3 second intervals. The only way to approach this topic is if you were to average the amount of skill that is possible by players over a period of sufficient game play time. Assigning arbitrary values in the form of a scale is also ... difficult, as a scale of numeric 'skill' is non-existant. Any scale you use may, unit for unit, not be equally 'skillful' in comparison to other skill components. But for the sake of getting this done, lets just make this simple...

Assuming a most skill based map, environment, level, song, track, weapons, gear etc, over a game play period of approximately 10 mins of continuous play with each individual skill component having a maximum value of 100 'skill' I hereby present to you what I think the skill ceilings of certain games are. They are generated from my observations of the most highly skilled play available to each game, from various sources:

Of course this is all quite subjective. Until a more in-depth analysis can be done employing methods capable of actually gathering the true values these components should represent, these ratings should be considered ... a little off. Not to mention biased. But it's a start. An attempted theory, if you will, quite subject to my own personal criticism. First of all, it is hard to define arbitrary values in the form of a scale for each component, for many reasons. One reason is that each individual component can not really be compared to the others numerically, so a 'skill value' is somewhat inappropriate to use. Really, what this skill measurement system is attempting to describe is a purely visual way of observing how much skill can be injected into the sorts of games described, and how certain games, by the very nature of their design, offer higher or lower skill ceilings than others that are similar. In this case, I would like to think that Quake 3: Arena has a higher skill ceiling that say Modern Warfare 2, even though they are (apparently) in the same genre. This is because a game like Quake 3: Arena offers higher levels of many, if not all of the 5 components in the model. In a 10 min gameplay session, a Quake 3 player will have had more interactions, more observations and assessments, more inputs and a longer history of changes to an ongoing strategy. Basically, time defines the skill ceiling of a game, and a game that is inherently faster, more diverse and offers more player freedom will inevitably have more room for skill.

Don't believe me? Watch this video of a professional Quake Live player, describing his 1v1 match against another opponent.



If you can show me a video where a professional modern day FPS gamer (i.e. Halo, MW etc) describing his/her gameplay in this detail with the same number of variables, items, controls, tactics and decisions being made, I will give you a $100. Seriously. When players are capable of doing actions similar to that in the previous video, when they have the ability to, even if the majority of people who play it do not, then a skill ceiling for a game can be drawn. Only through the analysis of the high-end players, what they do and what they are capable of in certain games, both hardcore and the professional, can a true understanding of and appreciation for a skill ceiling in a game be realised.

By no means am I saying that the people who play a more skillful game are inherently more skillful than the people who play a less skillful game. The skill ceiling of a game is simply just that. A player can play a skillful game and be nowhere near the cap, just as a player can be playing a slightly less skillful game and perceive themselves to be near the top of the possible skill ceiling. For the most part, they would probably be right. This model only focuses on the maximum skill allowed by a game and by no means suggests that it is the skill of the players who play them. Unless, of course, you are talking about the very best players of that game in the world. If I use the game Unreal Tournament from 1999, the game I feel I had the best grip on out of any other game, I can describe what I mean by this, and demonstrate another way in which this model can be used: personal mappings of one's own skill.


When it boils down to it though, the maximum skill capable in a game is demonstrated by the players. The maximum skill is, however, defined by the game. This, at least for prospective game designers, should be a very important realisation.

A brief return to story writing

I have never been a big fan of Star Wars. The old series or the new, the universe just seemed a little too ... comical for me (or something). It is actually one of the reasons why I think the more recent films did not succeed in the minds of viewers in the last few years. In today's TV series where you see gritty, hard-boiled character developed stories (e.g. BattleStar Galactica, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones), stories that succeed phenomenally ratings wise, it is easy to look at something like the recent Star Wars films and notice the incredible lack of it.

So, without really thinking about it much, I decided to write the introduction to a gritty story set in the Star Wars universe. It took me less than half an hour, but it is the kind of introduction to a sci-fi film that I reckon I would continue watching. There are slight elements of the Warhammer 40k universe in here (primarily because I am more familiar with it) that fans of that universe will probably easily spot. There are bound to be some bits that I have missed or interpreted incorrectly (again, not an avid fan of Star Wars at all), so bear with me. I swear I will make a post about gaming again when there is a game worth posting about.

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The music was making it hard to concentrate. The band of biths in the western corner of the bar had resorted to tunes native of their homeworld, unlike the typical jazzy score they were popular for. The night had drawn out and the occupants of the bar at this hour were not your usual attendants. Hard working labourers working inhumane hours slowly replaced by some of the seedier trades of the sector. Prositution. Drugs. Weapons. Slavery. Criminals and scumbags awakening in the night to do business into the new day. Through fear of martial arrest, the shroud of night had become their domain ... and consequently their prison. It would be hard to tell among this bunch.

Within this ominous setting there sat a figure, humanoid in shape, alone in the centre of the scene. He was dressed in what appeared to be blanketed rags, reaching the ground from the barstool and covering his neck and head like a hood and shroud. He looked tired, as well he should. He had travelled precariously far to get here and risked everything in doing so. Looking up from his glass into the gloomily lit surroundings, he noticed the approaches of a female twi'lek, gracefully striding to his table with the seductive confidence and manner of her kind. They both knew what this was. Removing his gaze from her bodice he stared blankly into her eyes. She looked back with the feigned eagerness that only an experienced 'worker' would possess. After a few moments, her expression changed and without saying a single word, the shrouded man convinced her that it was not going to happen. She returned glumly to her master's table, displeasure written across the man's face, confusion and shock written across hers.

The music was making it hard to concentrate. Removing his gaze from the whore and her unimpressed pimp, he drew his attention to the band and their alien instruments. Never one for music, he found the logic of the musicians puzzling. A usually respectable race performing a respectable profession amongst this sorry crew was a rare sight to behold. And what a sorry crew it was. Wookies, selonians, aqualish, jawas, rodians and, worse of all, humans. The worst of the galaxies species, all crowded in one coop. Racial tension would be high here, and any dispute would cause the whole bar to erupt in an orgy of violence. It would be difficult to perform amongst this crowd.

An angry fist was slammed into a table a few seats away from the shrouded man. Looks like it was too late. Something about incorrect payment, or a late delivery. It was hard to tell amongst all the laughing and profanity. However, it was obvious what was about to happen from where the shrouded man was sitting. The aggressor, in his rage, was not sitting on his chair correctly anymore and his victim was slowly reaching under the table with his foot while drawing a small blaster from his lower vest pocket. It was a rookie tactic, to feign defeat and fear while cowering in your position but giving yourself an advantageous maneuver. Almost anyone would have seen it coming, but the aggressor seemed to be completely blind in his fury. The foot went up, the blaster was drawn and the rodian was shot in the head while lying on his back. The bar went quiet, including the band, heads turning to the point of conflict for the briefest moment. The victor sat back down on his chair, gathering the slates on the table and eventually everyone looked away, the event already being forgotten. The music started up again.

The music was making it hard to concentrate. It was an unnerving tune, both sad and spooky having a lethargic feel to it, causing visitors to relax and slow down. The effects were subtle but noticeable, causing visitors to have another lazy drink or possibly open their wallets a little further for business. There is always a reason for everything and the shrouded man reflected on this, as he had done many times in the past. To casual observers, how this unknown human had ended up in the asshole of the galaxy was a big mystery. For him, it was but a brief moment in history, one that would resonate in due time.

It seemed the dispute was not completely over. Another rodian busted through the scanner doors and, noticing his companion lying dead on the ground, unholstered his weapon from his back and took aim at the previous victor. The shrouded man slowly lay his head on the table, as if going to sleep. The rodian fired a short burst, missing wildly and hitting the pimp in the back of the room. Killed instantly, the pimp's bodyguards drew their weapons and fired a hail of energy bursts in the direction of the assailant, killing both the rodian and the previous victor in the process, along with several others. All hell broke loose, everyone in the room grabbing for their blasters or diving for cover wherever they could find. Suddenly, the hall was filled with the cacophony of concentrated light waves dispersing air, the view a light show of blaster fire spitting on every surface of the bar. Someone had managed to bring in a lasrifle in and on full auto, quickly seared the occupants of the western side of the stage. He quickly became the target of almost everyone in the room, mowed down and torn to pieces by an endless stream of blaster fire. Someone on fire ran for the door but was cut down in the process. The smell of burning flesh and ionized air filled the room, a room still ablaze with both blaster light and flames. An explosion erupted from underneath a table, a droid's fuel compartment igniting within its hiding place, hurtling people towards the middle of the room. Amongst all this madness, the shrouded man still lay with his head on the table, eyes closed. Unmoving.

Eventually the blaster fire ceased. The smoke began to clear and the survivors crawled or limped slowly out of their hiding spots. A few stray shots were fired to finish people off, although almost everyone in the room had been killed. A large figure emerged from the back storage room, a gungan, fat and old. The owner of the bar. Mouth open in horror, he slowly moved to the middle of the hall, taking in the damage done to his place and the corpses lying everywhere. "What the fuck been doing in here you idiots!?", he bellowed, anger slowly forming across his ugly brow.

The female twi'lek, the whole time, had been watching the shrouded man lying on the table. The whole fight he had not moved. Whether he had been hit or not, prior or during, she did not know. Until he opened his eyes and looked at her.

The sound of ionized air, an electrical discharge and the flapping of large blanketed rags was heard throughout the room. An instant later, the head of the gungan landed deftly in the female twi'leks lap, tongue lolling ridiculously. The gungan's body, still in the centre of the room, next to the shrouded man's table, flopped on its side with a crash. Every eye in the room was focused on the weapon raised in the air. A weapon not seen in generations. A weapon marking something terrifying. A red weapon.

The shrouded man lowered the lightsabre, flicking the activation switch and watched as its form shrank back into the hilt. Giving the corpse of the gungan a light kick, he raised his head and listened. Looking to his left he observed the corpses of the bith band. If he still remembered how to smile he would have. After a moment he sat back down and began finishing his drink, taking a data slate from his sleeve and marking off his current target from a list of many. He closed his eyes and sat perfectly still, listening to the voices and alarms echoing in the distant night.

After some time, the female twi'lek, unaware of what she had just witnessed, came to stand over him.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Concentrating".

Into The Grey

Note: In an effort to talk about something different for once, I present my attempt at another movie review. Of course this doesn't actually mean I review it.

I have come to the conclusion that there is a large percentage of people who don't watch movies properly. Or maybe I should say ... are incapable of watching movies that are otherwise different from your standard Hollywood film but for whatever reason decided they would watch it. Now I know, movies are as subjective as other types of media. What one person likes is no guarantee that another person will like the same thing. I am not a fan of Scott Pilgrim VS The World, for example, but mainly because I believe it to be a stupid movie that is overrated. This opinion was brought on by the hordes of people saying it is the greatest film of 'our' culture and a film I would therefore thoroughly enjoy. This process, in my mind, created a space for a film of deep meaning, emotional story telling and with excellent cinematography. Scott Pilgrim did not deliver this.

This can be attributed to the fact that it was not anything like what I regard to be a brilliant movie, essentially what it was talked up to be. It is usually a strong combination of the three previously mentioned factors that result in a film I regard as worthwhile. These are the factors I look for in films which is where said subjectivity arises. I can understand if they are not the same factors other people look for in films ... but I do need to ask myself why.

What is it that people look for in the movies they watch, and why do people often have such vast differences in opinion regarding particular films? I feel there is a large audience out there that have become accustomed to the typical spoonfed style of Hollywood movies and therefore regard anything that slips off the boat as "boring", "weird" and "confusing". They are there for the laughs, the explosions, the same ridiculous romantic stories between impossible characters in unreal situations. If a movie lacks any of these tried and true attributes it is therefore somehow lacking in substance and not worthy of viewing.


So I finally come to 'The Grey', a movie I thought I knew what it would be like and what it was going to be about and, generally speaking, I was mostly correct. It was a film very much in the vein of something like The Thin Red Line, except to do with survival instead of war. It has an interesting way of delivering the story, a story that I will attempt not to spoil much of here. From forum posts, reviewer comments and even people I have met, opinions of this movie were very mixed but generally in the negative. "Boring", "weird" and "confusing" were terms being thrown around by many, while others complained about the foul language (?) and apparently dodgy ending.

For some, such negative peer remarks would dissuade one from seeing the film, but for me it only increased my interest. After all, this was a film I thought I knew what it would be like, and for it to be as bad as I thought it would be good ... well, I just had to see it then. If only for clarification and understanding.

So I saw it. As I thought, it was a movie that had elements of story telling similar to that of The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life and even 127 Hours. I do not mind this type of story telling at all. It can be quite effective in its abstractness, if that was the intended style of the movie's narrative. However, I came out of the movie at a complete loss as to what other people were complaining about it for. The questions and arguments they had against the film were not even remotely complaints for me ... and it bugs me. It bugs me because some of the arguments are so completely invalid, naught and unwarranted that I wonder if I actually saw the same movie as these people. Perhaps it is best described if I detail these arguments in a question and (my) response format, so you can understand my meaning:

1. Why did they move away from the plane crash?

My reply:
They had just crash landed on an ice plain in the middle of nowhere with rapidly dwindling food supplies. There are also freezing winds and sub-zero temperatures and they have barely any shelter. Also there are wolves attacking them and they believe they are on the wolves hunting grounds. Kind of hard to have missed that point...


2. Why was there over-dramatic, irrelevant and boring bits of self-reflection and happenings from the past?

My reply:
A lot of movies do this. Some don't even attempt to tie them in with the story at all (which is alright). A character looks at a photo and some random clip of them from their childhood is shown for a few seconds, seemingly unconnected. Or is it? I don't know what the term is, but I am going to call it impressionistic, non-chronological story development. Neeson's character allows for several moments of this style to be presented, all tying in some way to the movie. A poem by his father, a sentence from his wife, recollecting a prior event, experiencing a somewhat similar symbolic situation etc. Somehow they will have an impact on the development of the story. If you cannot see this, understand how it works or appreciate it as a method of exposition ... than you really shouldn't be watching this kind of movie at all. The message has failed upon you. Or rather, you it.


3. The ending sucked. What happened?

My reply:
Really? The ending seemed rather conclusive to me. He ended up in a situation he could not possibly survive and instead of throwing in the towel (like he was doing at the start of the movie), he chose to make a personal stand. Everything about the story, especially the impressionistic, non-chronological scenes, were leading up to this point. A final outcome against insurmountable odds, one in which you will most likely die. It was about accepting fate and the purgatory of life but still resisting it even if it is futile. Did he regain his faith? Did he kill a wolf? Did he even live? Good questions. Do you need to know the answers to them? In my opinion, the ending of the movie is far stronger with these questions left unanswered.

There is a higher meaning to films like The Grey than your standard Hollywood flick. Those who came expecting a movie where Neeson mindlessly punched wolves in the face were bound to be dissapointed. Those who came expecting a clear and happy ending were left a similar result. Not everything in life ends well, and this is a film that exposes that. Depressing? Maybe. I would prefer to call it honest.

The Grey is therefore not for everyone. Do I recommend it? That depends. I personally think it is a decent movie, one with deep meaning, emotional story telling and with excellent cinematography. However, that is what I personally look for in a movie and if your taste differs in any way, then no, I cannot recommend it to you. If, however, you can watch something a tiny bit different from what you expect and appreciate the light amounts of impressionistic, non-chronological story development it uses, than sure, you may get an interesting watch out of it.

However, it is the type of movie I would watch by yourself. There are some movies that are simply ruined by the presence of more impatient/talkative fellows and this is definitely one of them.

Also he does kill the Alpha wolf. Patience is a virtue.

Four Da Whored!!!

"You know you can take a noob, to like, water, but you can't, like, make a noob drink" - Jeremy, Pure Pwnage

I swore I would never play and pay for an MMO ever again. A game that has no end, no conclusive end goal or conditions to meet is not a game I want to be paying $30 a month for, and that's not including initial retail fees. To this day I have not broken that vow. Not even with what I am doing now.

Where's Wally?

What am I doing now? Well, its very simple. I am playing Vanilla WoW. For free. My end condition is to PvP my guts out. Not for gear, but for glory. For fun, whether that be derived from nostalgia or generated from happenstances, I know what it is I want to do with the game. So far it has worked out pretty well, though perhaps I should start from the beginning.

Roughly 3 weeks ago, before a trip overseas, I stumbled across what appeared to be a very popular and well maintained private vanilla WoW server. Advertised as 'blizzlike', it had a few notable changes to game play, some of which I much approve of. The most notable of these changes is simply a 12x increase in experience your character gains while leveling. This makes leveling ridiculously easy, fast and enjoyable, far removed from the painful grind to 60 that was the original WoW experience. I know this must have been difficult for some because I know of so many casual players who could not even reach 60 in the time that they played vanilla WoW, which in all honesty was only like 1/5 of the actual game.

You level so fast that quests go grey before you can even hand them in...

Leveling aside, the community also seemed incredibly active with up to and including 3500 players during peak and possibly up to 10,000 players total. This is smaller than your average Blizzard server, but for a private server that number is apparently considered huge. Someone, somewhere would at some point be doing or at least want to do the same sort of things you do, guaranteed. My experience in a few groups with members of the community have also been positive, the vast majority being experienced veteran players who are mostly playing classes they have played before. This also makes them competent PvP buddies/opponents, but I will get to that in a second.

Excited, I mentioned this 'opportunity' for potential free fun to the majority of the friends I thought would be interested. I remember thinking that a group of five of us instance hopping to 60 in a matter of days would at least be entertaining, with 12x experience, non-stop action and blues dropping by the bucketload fueling interest levels. Alas, after my two week vacation, it appears I have misjudged everyone's interests, which is unusual considering many of them complain about us not 'doing anything game related' together anymore.

-_-

I know exactly how you feel ...

This, however, did not stop me from undertaking this mission by myself. Even without company, not doing a single instance (until 60), and having terrible gear along the way, I still found the process to be quite fun. When you are not struggling to make a dent in your XP gain, attempting to maximize your questing efficiency and make travel times a minimum, you can comfortably explore and wander around the world at a much more relaxed pace. Knowing you could power level to 60 in a couple of days, but choosing not to is an interesting perspective, one that is unnatural in a game like WoW. It completely changes the leveling process and almost makes it optional instead of required. The 'grind' simply doesn't exist.

While I still feel this was a massively missed, face-palm worthy opportunity for a group of us to not be doing (hence my noob related introductory quote), I have decided not to let other people slow me down this time. In fact, I have moved onto something I have wished for for quite awhile, that being a return to objective style battle arenas set in a fantasy, RPG setting. Or, more simply, battleground PvP. I did my fair share of this back in the day and while I have no incentive to put in the number of hours I did back then, I am keen to experience the glories of yesteryear once again.

I'm talking about the massive 40 vs 40 AV battles that lasted hours, the intensity of close 1990:2000 AB games and carrying the flag in WSG into an open field to face off against the enemy team, with your own team at your back. The entire reason I kept playing WoW was mostly in hope of this aspect of the game to continue and not to be replaced with dueling matches in a box (i.e. Arena). If I wanted a dueling game I would go back to TTM in UT99. But, it wasn't meant to be and BG PvP slowly dissipated from the minds of players, even resented and branded as noob by the rating obsessed, gear spoiled elitist jerks of the WoW Arena community. But that's a topic for a different discussion...

Arcanite Reaper HOOOOOOO!!!!

So I got to 60 in just under two days 'played', and that was with a LOT of fucking around. Mining, afk, leveling smithing and first aid, doing quests for gear etc. I could probably have done it in 1 day played if I didn't care about it. Now that I have gear suitable enough to PvP with, I will turn this game into the game I wanted it to be so many years ago, that being a casual BG PvP game. Think League of Legends, except in 3rd person, less hero classes, more randomness and a billion more buttons to press and you get the idea. I don't care about ranks, I don't care about gear. I just care about fun.

And by golly will I have it. With or without company.

Edit: The following video is a quick edit of my horribly geared warrior in PvP. As much as I will probably never edit to Eminem ever again, I thought the editing style was interesting and effective at points and I will probably use it for another video in the future.

Ultrakill LAN 2012

Recently I hosted another Ultrakill LAN after the somewhat failure that was the last mini-one, with people leaving and not playing games all over the place. This one went somewhat better. In fact, this one was probably more like the LANs of old that I remember in my highschool days. A dedicated and keen crew playing multiple games in a somewhat undisturbed peace makes for true LAN experiences, something I witness rarely these days.

I think the magic ingredient is, as mentioned, to play lot of different game types at a moderate pace. Roughly 2hrs a game is plenty and gives everyone the opportunity to shine at games they are most comfortable with. Providing that you participate, it is humbling to get your ass whooped in X game repeatedly when you know you did the whooping not too long ago in Y game. It makes your random victories in Y game more satisfying, but keeps the gaming environment fair and friendly.

Despite some ... differences in opinion between participants, I think everyone got along well enough and I look forward to hosting another one sometime in the middle of this year. Granted, anyone who attended this recent LAN will be the first to be invited.



I am still irritated about the demo recording for Sven Coop getting corrupted though. It would have easily been the most hilarious and insane footage from the LAN by far and made the associated video that much more entertaining.

Terrible Yet Beautiful

It is not often that I play games in the vein of GTA 3 anymore. After San Andreas, I was done. Not because it was a bad game or anything. I just felt the genre didn't have anything else to offer me.

Just Cause 2 proved me wrong in that regard, as insane and explosion-porn-like as it was. I would say however that it kept me interested mainly because it wasn't about rival gangs and hoods in a stereotypical American city, but rather an oppressed island nation fighting back against the government. It was incredibly open, diverse and looked and played great. Being a game where you are essentially spiderman with a gun will do that.

I didn't have much of an interest in Saint's Row The Third when it came out. It seemed to me like just another GTA clone that would probably be worse than GTAIV was, which apparently was boring and had lost its charm. I wouldn't have purchased the game if I wasn't informed of its $20 price tag from greenmangaming, but since buying and playing it I am glad I did. I think there is a lesson in this, that being that your non-experienced impressions can occasionally be wrong and you should go to the effort to making up your own mind in an informed manner. There isn't really much to say about it so far (not even 1/2 way through atm) so I will simply post this picture/comic of your everyday encounter with innocent citizens in this digital world:


... terrible, yet beautiful. All it needs is a trollface.

Edit: Video testing coop gameplay.

My horror story

Edit: I should probably mention this earlier in this post lest anyone get the wrong impression. I don't dislike consoles or the games that are best designed for them. There are, in fact, many games that I think excel on console and should only ever be played on console. Fighting, driving, sports, shmups and platform games are all examples of these. My issue lies when games and more importantly, game design suffers when games that shouldn't be built for consoles are. It is of my strong opinion that both RTS and FPS games fall into this domain, and why I have such a seething resentment for FPS games that are built exclusively for the console market. It should never have happened to FPS games and they are worse off today because of it...

Recently I attended a social event organised by my university colleagues and I to play some games that involved catchup options in modern games. To provide an example of what a catchup option is, think of the Ultra bar that charges slowly when you take damage in Street Fighter IV. It is something that allows a losing player to equalise the playing field, should they know how to effectively employ it. A lot of fighting, racing and even FPS games have them. I do not have a problem with catchup options as I am all for allowing players who are losing considerably, slight advantages for them to still remain competitive. As long as they don't tip the balance in an overpowered manner or effectively rubberband the winning players from their deserved position. I am, however, totally against options that allow a winning player to continue winning ... but that is a heated topic for a later date.

So ... this event. We played a number of games and people generally had fun. There isn't really much to say about the specifics of what happened as it would probably seem pretty boring to an observer/outsider. There was, however, one thing that stood out dramatically for me which is why I am making this post. I consider it a brainfuck of epic proportions now that I think about it, mainly because it both proves and hammers home everything that I despise about console FPS games. Yes, it's one of these posts again. Sif not.

While I was busy fighting some people in SSFIV (a game I still consider to be terrible at), I couldn't help but notice that Halo Reach was being started up on the TV adjacent to the one a group of us were playing on. I wasn't aware of there being catchup options in a game like Halo Reach. In fact, I was quite certain (and still am) that there are not, as it is in fact the opposite of catchup with the whole regenerating shields/HP bullshit that it spawned in the last generation of shooters. Nevertheless, for some bizarre reason, I was curious as to why everyone was so keen to try it out. What was I missing?

As the afternoon continued, I noticed some people were giving up and handing controllers over to others. It seemed like some of the people, namely the ones who wanted to play the game in the first place, were feeding off the less competent in a rather egoic fashion to the point where the less fluent were not willing to contribute anymore. Some of the non-fluent players openly admitted to finding both the genre (FPS) and the method of control (360 controller) to be cumbersome, which I remember thinking was a fair statement at the time. I did not inquire as to what their preferred genre or method of control was as I was too busy pullling off an Akuma Ultra, but it did irk me somewhat. Eventually my sparring partner and I had enough of fighting each other and surrendered the game to another two people, so I made my way to the other television, only to squint at it in utter disbelief. Now, we were playing on rather large 50" TV's at a reasonably close distance. Admittedly my eyesight is not perfect, but it wasn't so much a resolution issue as it was a framerate and visual clarity related one. I suppose the 360 shouldn't be expected to run four instances of the game (at least from a UI point of view) in four separate windows for four players with any respectable visual magnificence, but it seriously looked like something from the early 2000's. But then I noticed that one of the screens wasn't moving. There was also a controller on a seat where someone had given up and just left it there. I don't know why I did it, and I regret doing it even now, but something akin to the competitive berserker I knew in my early years of UT99 fired at that point, so I grabbed the controller and sat down.

I remember being quite enthusiastic. "Why not?" I thought. Surely they can't be as bad as I have been preaching all these years. Maybe I have just been a misinformed, biased lunatic and simply havn't gotten over the hump that is the torture of using a controller for playing FPS games. If I could get past that, maybe I could look past all the other bullshit that evolved as a result of it.

Below is a graph of my enthusiasm over time:

Note: The game played was actually Halo Reach, but it is essentially the same

Roughly linear, it took me less than a minute to go from a highly enthused, keen-for-frags young man to a blank faced, eye-twitching Hannibal Lecter, observing the silly man who could not play his instrument properly in the orchestra. To an extent, that pun is two-fold. I was watching a tiny screen of a player not doing things correctly ... but I was watching it from a player who knew how to DO them correctly. You see, in that less than a minute of play I had performed the following sequence of events:

1. Turned around, taking a good second or two
2. Moved to the end of a corridor, in what seemed like a year of gameplay
3. Realised it was a non-obvious dead end with nothing in it and and frowned at the point of the corridor
4. Walked back down the corridor, looking back at the SSFIV screen longingly while doing so
5. Exploded around a corner from a grenade not thrown at me
6. Respawned back in the corridor
7. Ogled worriedly at the responsiveness, speed and sensitivity of the controls
8. Started a gunfight with someone who got the jump on me
9. Noticed the significant amount of auto-aim granted
10. Still managed to shoot walls and windows more than I shot the dude
11. After a year, killed him (I think I had more shield regenned due to floating around jumping)
12. Got one shotted in melee
13. Respawned back in the corridor

If I wasn't holding a controller I think I would have face-palmed around about that point. I continued playing for a few more minutes, longer than what that graph suggests (you get the point though). At some point I found a sprint button and laughed out loud at the meager increase in speed it offered, sacrificing aim. Everything. Everything I had been saying and ranting about for the last few years was still true. Worse in fact, if that was possible. I remember thinking how had we come from the glorious days of Quake, UT and Half-life to this shamble of game play and mechanics? The precision of keyboard and mouse, the multi-task capability of the PC, the flexibility of graphical and control settings, the variable and ever increasing speed of the internet, LANs where everyone would bring their own terminal and comfortably do what they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted ...

... to sitting in a stinky, cramped room around a TV, squinting at 1/4 of a screen, trying to make out the environment from the UI/weapon, taking forever to do anything using a horrible control peripheral with a horrible control scheme, fighting the game more than I am playing the game, a game that is apparently a FPS and supposedly a good one at that. HOW!!!?? Why is this considered normal, good and fun? This has to be the shittest FPS experience I can think of!

Halo Reach - your average frag video (recent)

The thing is, it is considered normal. Not just by the developers, the publishers and the general media. By the consumers. This is apparently what the average consumer wants and what the average consumer considers to be an enjoyable FPS experience. At some point during my play I actually glanced at my opponents/colleagues in bewilderment, eyebrows raised, to see their reactions. They were having a ball! Laughing, joking, merry as can be. I felt sick. Have I really been missing something important all these years? Hours of fun playing console FPS games with friends, squinting my eyes into blindness at 1/4 of screens every weekend? My god, surely the problem wasn't me ...

But then I looked at their screens. At what they were doing. The simplest of movements. No vertical aiming. No circle-strafing. Chasing someone for ages with a powersword, to kill them instantly only when they stopped moving. No jumping. Camping on weapon/player spawns. No defensive retreats, no running backwards pot-shotting around corners. No strafing, checking corners, looking behind for an instant to check for chasers. No sense of awareness, no sense of self-preservation, no strategy and no plan.

Nothing that I was doing and everything that I wasn't doing.

It was then that I realised ... that they were all just a bunch of scrubs. To them, seeing enemy and running forwards while pressing fire was the limit of their FPS capability. Even with auto-aim, wrestling to keep the crosshair on a target using the horror that is console controls WAS the challenge. Everything and anything that goes beyond that exceeds their ability to perform in a multi-task manner ... and I couldn't blame them. I was struggling to perform 1/2 the shit I was doing in a timely manner and more often than not, it was getting me killed. So used to circle-strafing a target while engaging, quickly checking a door way while bunny-hopping, checking for respawns and equalising distance based on enemy location/firepower that it was actually inhibiting my ability to play the game. Simply put ... you CAN'T! At least in any acceptable amount of time. The sluggish controls of the console controller and the responsiveness translated into the game are not worth the effort of doing. So you are quite literally forced to just move forward and shoot if you want to have the advantage over someone you come across. You meet them, you shoot before they shoot, you wrestle to keep the crosshair on them and whoever did that better wins. Gee-fucking-gee!

Quake 3: Arena - your average frag video (old)

I remember back in the day I would have struggled with this even on keyboard and mouse. Aiming, moving and shooting were the limits of my skill. Over time however, it became muscle memory, a reflex that is instinctively ingrained in the way I play these games. I don't think about it, and I think for a lot of people who grew up playing FPS games on PC it would be the same. So you consider other things, get better at other techniques, learn weapon mechanics and so on and so forth. Not for every game, but at least for those that offer them. When you go 'back' to a game where all you really have to think about is aiming, moving and shooting because that's all you really can do ... it's hard to break out of habits. I want to do certain things and I just cant do them. This is, in my opinion, a problem.

I didn't voice my opinion of the game at the time, mainly because I knew it would have gone on deaf ears and because it wasn't what other people wanted to hear. As much of an elitist prick I can be on this blog at times, I know when my views are not welcome in a social situation. So, I swallowed my pride, took my helping of fail and smiled politely when the owner of the game boasted of their score at the end, repeatedly. Remaining humble and collected was more of a challenge to me than expressing my opinion, something I think more people should do more often concerning other topics in life. I did quietly kick his ass at SSFIV later though :)

So, to cut a long story short, this event can be summed up as a realisation of two things:

1. Console FPS games (like Halo Reach) are not designed to allow players to employ many of the techniques, skills and logic that origintated from their PC ancestors
2. People enjoy playing the aim-move-shoot mini-game that essentially is these sorts of games nowadays because its all you can do and because it is in itself a challenge due to the impracticality of the controller

Subconsciously I have always known this, but to see it laid out in front of me from a first-hand, social experience is horrifying.

My Diablo III beta experience

After receiving the opportunity to try out the Diablo III beta from a friend, I have come to the following conclusion: I am going to fuck up the final year of my PhD because of this game. Let me explain...

I have always had a strange relationship with Diablo. I never played the first one and was introduced to the second one roughly the time it was released by a cousin of mine. He was addicted to the game and explained how it was affecting his first year university studies. I gave it a go and didn't really see the appeal. Too much clicky, not enough rewardy is probably what I was thinking at the time. After a couple of hours I grew bored and shelved it with the intention of never playing it again.

Oh what a fool I was! But how was I to know? How was I to KNOW!? It's the numbers, you see. Oh yes, it was ... it was the numbers ...

sif not

So ... it was the numbers. Anyone who has played an RPG seriously or dabbled into the likes of games such as WoW will know what I am talking about. You 'see' numbers, whether they be related to your health or armour or critical strike chance or perhaps the damage you are doing, and so you ... see ... them. You see? See, the numbers are how they get you. It's like licking grains of crack every time you see and mentally process what they are. Low on health, a big crit, fuck tons of armour. The numbers don't lie, and your ability to maintain and fix a situation using other numbers is somewhat satisfying. You can be a terrible mathematician and still enjoy the process of observing big red numbers above your avatar, refilling your health bar with green numbers while simultaneously pressing buttons to make orange and white numbers appear on the enemies. It's all to do with numbers and people's want/desire to manipulate and rectify them.

Now, that probably sounds a bit insane. It probably is. In a normal situation, the previous scenario would likely be described by a regular fellow as (for example) "killing an elite who is doing a lot of damage to you while you pot and spam your abilities". That sounds more like a game, doesn't it? Still, while you may think you are looking at textured polygonal meshes translating and animating in three dimensional coordinate space, you are still undertaking the process of manipulating and rectifying numbers. It's just prettied up a bit to deceive you from your true nature - that you are obsessed and compelled towards changing numbers. Forever.

You're your yore

What the flying fuck am I talking about? Well, let's get back to what I was originally describing with my early Diablo experiences. It didn't take long for the numbers to haunt me back in the year 2000. As much as I thought I didn't want to play the game, I just could not let my health pool be that low. That axe could probably have used an upgrade too, hitting only from 3-6. What about that sash? It's only got 1 armour, is cracked and looks like shit! Come on, have some style at least. And so it began. I did eventually stop playing the game some time in 2002, though my high-school friends and I eventually picked it up again in our final year and eventually took it into first year of university. While some awesome moments did arise from that (e.g. the fabled Ratmen incident), Diablo slowly slipped away in the face of bigger, prettier and more time consuming games of similar nature. By which I mean World of Warcraft.

"Fuck! I died" - The Ratmen Incident

So, Diablo III. This post is already getting stupidly long and I don't care about going back and making it shorter so I will sum up my experiences of the beta so far in bullet point format:

• The beta is overall far too easy. No enemies, not even the boss at the end, really pose a challenge
• It was incredibly short
• It doesn't actually look that great. This is something I have a problem with Blizzard and their latest games. While I am all for performance, their production timelines are confusing
• It's very dark and gloomy. Hopefully this changes as the game continues
• Combat is somewhat boring and repetitive early on. This is unfortunately the nature of these sort of games though
• Sound design is excellent
• It feels very similar to Diablo II, albeit a few changes here and there (e.g. Artisans)
• Killing/destruction streaks give you incentive to pop the shit when you fight a screen filled horde of enemies
• It is addictive
• I will more than likely buy the game when it is released

So, with that out of the way we can get to the most important part of this post. Oh yes...

... that being the NUMBERS!!!!!! GLORIOUS NUMBERS!!!!! Mwaahaahaglrgrgrll!!!

HUEHUEHUEHUEEHUEHEUHUEH!!!

Wllaarrgrala!! Wllaarrgralaaaaa!!!!

BOOOOOMMM!!!! BOM!!

Glleeenerghg!!!!

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

awww...

Berserker Rage: Sated

Not really much to say about this except that it is likely the last Skyrim execution video I will make. I have done enough executing to last me a lifetime, and that was before I even started Frapsing for this video. Now I can play and enjoy the game more without my framerate dropping to 30 fps everytime I find a dude to kill.



I have went for a slightly different editing procedure this time, not using heroic/trailer music and instead using a couple of tracks blending into each other. They are from X-Men: First Class and were used to make the video seem a little bit darker/edgier. Not entirely sure if I am happy with the results. I think heroic music just suits the world of Skyrim better.

Additionally, I have improved upon my original Skyrim weapon after painfully leveling alchemy, the only profession I actually regard as taking some skill and effort to level properly (unlike facerolling smithing and enchanting). This is mainly because you actually have to find the vast majority of the ingredients you need to make stuff (to simply level) instead of just rocking up and buying out a vendors supplies and making 50 iron daggers. The following 2h Daedric Greatsword I have appropriately renamed as 'The Soulreaver' (sif not Legacy of Kain) is the result of this process and in all honesty, a complete waste of time. Even on master, the game has become too easy as these weapons just do too much damage. I don't think this damage was intended by the developer.

"The descent had destroyed me... and yet, I lived"

This is with both Berserker Rage (100% extra) and a Fortify two-hand damage potion (130% extra) activated.