Random rantings on Text/command line inputs...

While I was doing some research on Text-Based games such as King's Quest, I often wonder how much do these interfaces cater for funny inputs by the user?

For you programmers out there, you know how we like to compile using the "Make" command?
Well I was doing some C++ stuff the other day, and I wonder how smart is the Compiler in natural language processing, and I came up with an interesting error message when I try to "Make Love" (LOL)

Here's a snap shot!

The computer as expected, not only that it doesn't know how to Make Love, it doesn't acknowledge the existence of such concept!

LOL..

King's Quest : A 3D Animated Adventure Game?

Okay, for the long overdued blogging exercise, I am using the classic Sierra graphical adventure series, particularly Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest series (from 1-4).

Let’s take the first one, Kinq’s Quest : Quest for the Crown, released in 1984 for the personal computer. King’s Quest is set in a fantasy medieval kingdom ‘Daventry’.

The plot is simple really; the old and frail King Edward was looking for a worthy successor to his Kingdom and for it, he sends his bravest knight, Sir Graham to retrieve three magical items: the magic mirror, shield and chest, all which have been stolen. If Sir Graham succeeds, he will become the next king.

So we take the role of Sir Graham, and the game environment is sort of three dimensional in a sense that you’re able to move him in any direction and the maps are continuous (if you keep going west by exiting the screen from the left hand side, you will eventually appear in the same screen again from the east). Freedom of movement is definitely the revolutionary thing about this game, and the other thing is the concept of ‘Text Input’ as a means of interaction. Just like we saw in ‘Façade’, you interact with the game universe by typing things like “Look around”, “Open door”, or “Talk to the Lady” etc. The game has some sort of natural language processing for recognizing the player’s intentions through interpreting the text input, and I must say although it is somewhat restricted (like you can’t actually do funny things such as, well, whatever you imagine you can do with the f-word…), it is quite consistent and reliable, and they do give you a sense of freedom and interactivity.

I played this game back in 1989 and I was totally blown off by the concept of being able to roam around in a fantasy universe and try to get as much interaction with the environment as possible. The idea of the game is to gather up as much clues about what you need to do next, and by exploring things and talking to people (or creatures), you can sort of work out what needs to be done and how to do it. For me, I was lazy and I just got a walkthrough (they somehow came together with the copy of the game when I bought it, hmm…), and just follow exactly what to do, what to say, and how to do them.

Discuss the tension between agency and narrative structure within the game. Do you agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist? Why/why not?

Okay, so this game definitely has strong narrative elements. There is an initial state (equilibrium) of a peaceful Kingdom with an old King Edward, and this equilibrium was disrupted when the magical items’ gone missing, and we take the role of Sir Graham in order to retrieve the items and restore the disrupted state back into a new equilibrium where he assumes the position of the King.

The game seems to offer a high level of interactivity with the 3-d universe and text input. The objective of the game is to retrieve three magical items: the magic mirror, shield and chest, and they can be individually done in any order. In a sense the game is divided into smaller quests, in which to retrieve each of the items, a number of tasks need to be performed and a number of supporting items need to be gathered first. For instance, to get the magic mirror, I need to throw a bucket of water to kill the dragon guarding the magic mirror in the dungeon underneath a hidden well. So we need to figure out, where the hidden well is, and once you found it, how to get into the dungeon and how to kill the dragon.

Sometimes you also find items whose purpose are not clear until later in the game; for instance, you collect some pebbles near a pond somewhere only to realize that they are to be used to kill a giant with a slingshot later on. So “items gathering” is sort of the abstract design tools behind this game (maybe in a sense it is also like a puzzle because you gather items and information to solve a particular situation in order to proceed). But the interactive part of this game only comes from carefully getting the sequence right in gathering the items necessary and performing the actions required to do so, all of which eventually, lead to a predetermined set of results. The game is really an interactive puzzle with a story.

In a sense, yes I do agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist, because like in this game, interactivity is sort of limited in which you are not given the ability to explore anything else in the game other than the predetermined goals of the game. There are times in the game when I wish I could have done more, such as, why can’t I just trade the magic items with a witch in the game, cut a deal with her so that she could kill Edward, and made me King instead? Or why can’t I use the magical items to enrich myself and don’t care about inheriting the kingdom, or start my own Kingdom? Given the hope of full exploration of a fantasy universe and interactivity through text interface, King’s Quest seems to offer a potential in delivering both good narrative while offering full interactivity at the same time, but I guess it’s just a story book waiting to be ‘played’.

How is time represented in the game? Is there a separation of story and discourse time? How does the game’s use of time allow for interactivity?

Time seems to be standing still! You could turn the game on for 24 hours and the color of the sky in the game doesn’t change a single bit. The game has a “Save/Load Game” feature, and it’s kind of beating the purpose of full immersion because now you can save at one point of the game, and when you realize you have done something you didn’t intend to do or something which resulted in unexpected outcomes, then you can always go back to that saved state where you can start again the next course of action, making sure things get done right this time around.

Time in this game is represented as a ‘parallel universe’ kind of concept, in which the story time is completely separated with the discourse time. So long as you have a saved game at that particular state of story time, you can change the outcome of the future in the story time by going back to the saved state. Interactivity is made possible by the ability to explore the consequence of an action, and allow the player to decide whether they want to continue with that course of action or restore the previous state to try out another.

Some people call this save/load feature as cheating, or destroying the flow of the game, or even enjoyment of the game, but some people can’t live without it, but I guess it depends on how people set their expectations on what kind of experience they want to get from the game, like, for people who wants some challenge, they can choose to completely isolate themselves from the outside world to be fully immersed in the game, play the game until the character dies, and start again from the beginning, or people like to experience the story to the end of it by making sure they don’t always get killed half way…

Street Fighter 2: World Warrior

To pay tribute to the name of the Blog, I would like to dedicate this entry for what I would argue as the King of all Fighting game of all time, the game that started the craze for 2D Fighting games (and even sparked the development of later 3D ones, such as Sega's Virtua Fighter).

Here’s a Wiki Entry for those who never heard of this game : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II

(For Girls : you’re excused if you never heard of the game, but for Guys… You must be kidding me…unless you’re born like, very recently)

I started to play this game back in primary school, I think the year was 1992 when this sucker appeared in my neighborhood pool parlor back in Jakarta, not a very nice place to hang out, but hey, with Street Fighter on the menu, the smoky and rather sleazy place was always packed.

What’s really appealing about this game is the degree of freedom you get in trying to pull out a combination of offensive/defensive moves in order to beat your opponent. Each character has their own fighting styles, with punches and kicks of different kinds and strengths(3 each). What makes it revolutionary is the introduction of the concept of “Special Move” where by through a combination of key motions and button presses, your character are able to perform this special move which, well for one, looks cool, and also can inflict some serious damage to the opponent if executed successfully.

At first, I was never any good at it, those punks at the arcades always managed to beat me within minutes, but once I got my hands on the Super Nintendo console port, I began to practice like for hours and hours everyday after school. Me and my buddies always got together at someone’s place over the weekend and we would just kick each other’s asses the whole day.

(I tend to use Ryu and Ken a lot, and sometimes Guile if I really wanna be cheesy and piss everyone off… but hey, I’ve been playing this game over and over for almost 10 years now, you pick someone up in random for me, and I’ll beat the cr*p out of you haha..)

Now, on the discussion questions..

1. Describe the formal elements that make up the game. Be as clear and detailed as possible.

Players:
Two Participants compete directly, either two human players or 1 human player versus the computer.

Objectives:

- Beat each other’s defense and ‘kill’ the opponent. Each player has an energy bar, depletes as they take damages from each other.

- The objective is to deplete the opponent’s energy bar until empty or until time runs out, in which the player who remains alive or has more energy than the other stays in the game either to compete with the next human player, or compete against the computer if no other human challengers.

Procedures:

- The movements are limited to a simple bi-directional walk (front and back), upward, forward and backward jumps, standing and ducking. Punches and kicks can be performed while standing/ ducking, or jumping.

- Both players are free to move around, use any of the punch or kick moves to inflict damage to each other, anywhere in the fighting arena within the duration of the round (around 2 minutes).

- The arena has two ends, so a player could get cornered if got pushed enough.

- There are two kinds of blocks, upper block for all attacks above the waist and lower block for below the waist.

- Two Players can attack at the same time, and inflict damage simultaneously. But most of the time, a player will be attacking while the other takes the damage. Some special moves can cancel each other (such as ‘fireballs’)

- A player will temporarily lose control of the character when taking a hit, the stronger the hit, the longer it takes for them to get the control back, allowing certain ‘Combination’ moves to be performed inflicting as much damage as possible.

Rules:

- Whoever depletes the energy of the opponent until empty wins

- If time runs out, whoever has the more energy remaining, wins

- If both player has the same amount of energy when time runs out, the round is considered a draw, and the round is repeated.

- To win the match, a player must win two rounds, from a maximum of 5 rounds. If no winner until the end of round 5, both players lose.

- Winning player get to use the same character until they get beaten.

- No rules on how damage is inflicted (can punch, kick, throw, bite, etc)

- Blocking punches and kicks will inflict no damage, but special moves inflict damage if blocked

Resources:

- Energy bar (Health)

- Time limit (2 minutes)

- Fighting arena

Conflict:

- Dilemma: Some special moves leave the character in a ‘frozen’ stance open for attack, for instance, if a player performed a move that gets avoided, the other player can carefully counter attack the vulnerable player, so moves have to be planned carefully.

- Obstacles: Time and Energy is limited, so must attack or be a sitting duck!

Boundaries:

- Malfunctioning controllers can seriously affect game performance

- Pressure from the surroundings, such as viewers, or opponent’s peers making verbal gestures or sometimes threats.

Outcome:

- Winning player accumulates score to be contested on the score board.

- Incumbent winner stays in the game as long as there is challenger, or continue to fight the computer until all the computer opponents are defeated and the player gets treated for a short ‘Ending’ sequence, with a bit of narrative behind why the character fought within the game universe.

2. Does this description fully capture the requirements for playing the game? Are there any additional rules or assumptions that you may have left out? Do these need to be written down? Why/why not?

I would say that one assumption that people would tend to make is that their opponent knows all the moves and have around the same experience/ skills in playing. Against experienced players, beginners wouldn’t have a chance because they would just go ahead and beat the poor newbie without giving him a chance to practice. But sometimes, experienced players can somehow realize that their opponent needs a bit of breathing space so they tone down their offenses, other wise it wouldn’t be fun, just like stealing candy bar from a little kid. Some experienced players also realize that certain characters in the game are able to pull out certain moves that are very difficult to counter, therefore offsetting the balance of the game if such character is being used. So sometimes, experienced players tend to use the weaker characters in order to just try their skills, or use the stronger character but avoid using such moves that are deemed to be “cheap-shot” or “cheesy”. And sometimes, due to the surroundings and social context, players might want to tone down their game play if they sense that the player they’re about to beat the cr*p out of, might not like the idea of losing, and might take it to another intensity outside the game itself, so for games such as Street Fighter where there is a high sense of male masochism and pride, sometimes you win not by beating the other guy, but by losing out to him so that he would not lose his face in front of his gang or whatever. And these kinds of rules, are somewhat external to the game, but you might want to take into consideration when you’re playing outside with others.

3. Following Doug Church’s approach, try to extract the abstract design concepts that constitute the gameplay. Can these be transferred to a different type of game? Why/why not?

I think this game is only about knowing your characters, everything about them, such as memorizing the kind of moves they can perform and how to carry them out. Because these moves involves real physical ‘button bashin’ skills, to put in an abstract concept, I would describe it as ‘Skills Mastery’, as one would do in learning techniques in dance or martial arts.

Skills mastery: The player chooses a character/ subject that suits their preference for competition styles/ moves the best. They learn and master as much as possible the moves and strengths of their characters or the codes of the game system, in order to be able to carry out a combination of attacks to inflict the maximum result while minimizing their penalties.

A game that we can also apply this concept to is Dance Dance Revolution, where you get to practice the combinations of taps in order to hit all the directional pads you’re supposed to hit. Although there are no characters in this game, in a sense, other parameters can also become a character that you can learn/ master, such as the accompanying Song or the difficulty level, as each song carries their own signature combination of moves which can be learnt and memorized and mastered.

Or maybe even Racing games? I realize that Racing games rely on the kind of cars you select or the kind of Stages you choose to race on, where you get to memorize the particular challenging corners which you have to tackle, or the kind of gear combinations in order to successfully maneuver a particular corner. I remember someone showed me that he could beat the Expert level of Daytona USA (time trial mode, no other cars in the track) while having his eyes closed! He told me that its all about memorizing when and where to turn the car and when to switch the gears etc, all based on timings.