Pandora’s Box is a text-based mystery game. That’s a lie. It’s text based. It is a mystery game. But the fact is it’s something else. If I knew what it was I’d tell you and you’d be all like, “Oh Seth Tipps, the Great Reviewer of Artsy Games!”, and I’d be all like, :”Yes.” Well that’s not how this is going to work. I’m going to talk to you about the most disturbing thing in the whole game; vanishing poos.

I think I got through about ten lines of dialogue in the game, absolutely nothing to give me my bearings any more than the art did when I found myself in a shower. This is the most relaxing moment in the game; no one is having their face go all Chesire cat on you (this happens); there isn’t any crazy, mashed-up music playing in the background (this is almost constant); and no one is talking about stuff you don’t think has happened yet (this becomes less of a problem). For a few seconds it’s just you listening to the sound of a shower. Then you notice the poo. You can either ignore it or “lean down to investigate”.

As I envision myself something of the investigative journalist, this is exactly what I do. Another dialogue box pops up; “Is this MY excrement?”. I nudge the “excrement” with my foot. It vanishes.

You might think my fascination with this episode a bit… infantile. Had I decided to spend this long writing about the toilet bits in just about any other game that’s exactly what it would be. I can’t remember any other game that has used bodily leavings for anything other than a crude joke or a pretense at “realism”. The fact is this is legitimately chilling. You are naked, vulnerable, and relaxed as the water pours over you and washes off all the dirt, grime, and stress. It is one of the great luxuries of modern life. Suddenly there appears a fly in the ointment- a call back to the terrifying unreality of the world you inhabit- the unclean invader on the shower floor.

I asked the guys at Terror Bull games if this was some reference I wasn’t getting. The game’s chock full of them. Certainly this has to be something that can be logicked through? Surely this has a rational explanation? No, “The vanishing poo is just vanishing poo.” Ladies and gentlemen, vanishing poo is never just vanishing poo. It is the most unnatural thing to ever have pop up in a shower.

The game is a puzzle. It means us to try and understand it. You are given three clues as to why you’re trapped in this endless loop, and when you collect them you can finish the game if you want. They are vague, but if you paid attention at university you should be able to piece them together and form a hypothesis about what’s going on. It doesn’t stop there though. This game is scary because you can’t really understand all of it. It mixes the artistic and rational with the earthy, stinking reality of our most mortal of leavings, and then vanishes them into the irrational existential void in which the game is set.

People, play Pandora’s Box. It’s smart. It may not necessarily be a masterpiece for all ages, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s one of the few games out there that uses genre as a storytelling advice. It’s one of the few games that respects your intelligence without stumbling into pretension, and for crying out loud they manage to do that while including piles of excrement in a shower without descending into cheap laughs.

Thank you, Terror Bull, for giving me shit in a game without the bullshit.

The inestimable John Walker wrote this the other day as a guide to new games journalists. His main point is about sticking up for yourself and not giving someone valuable words without getting your share of the profit. All my free writing is available here on my blog, so I’m good there. But the thing that strikes me is how he de-emphasizes the actual playing of games. I mean, I kinda thought I was unique; that I was just copying habits I developed in history by spending as much time learning about the source as I did with the thing itself. Turns out that’s just the business.

I have a certain advantage. I write mostly about indie games. They are usually shorter, and there are fewer that have reached the public eye. The guys I want to interview are desperate for the publicity in most cases. The hangup is that you are writing lower profile pieces. People are less likely to read your work, so it’s worth less money. I’m guessing I could get some good cash out of claiming I’ve found the new Minecraft, but I haven’t. Or at least not one everyone else hasn’t already found.

The other hangup is that I’m a freelancer. There are an awful lot of stories I can’t get because I’m not going to be able to get an article in before a good staff writer picks it up. I offset that by going indie and doing a lot of research-heavy projects, but still, the escapist hasn’t gotten back to me on a single bloody article, and I suspect it’s largely my fault for not writing about escapisty stuff.

The thing is that all the hangups don’t matter. I write. I love writing. I love reading and criticizing writing. John may come off as a bit of the gruff and grizzled veteran in his post, but I think it’s a facade. It isn’t a warning letter to all those who would write about games for free, it’s an impassioned defense of a livelihood he loves, and doesn’t want to see bastardized by sub-par editors who exploit well-intentioned young hobbyists for shoddy copy. He’s right. They don’t really want to do this. This sucks. Except for the writing.

So if you’re game, buy yourself an AP Writer’s Guide and a copy of Strunk and White and start writing. The worst that can happen is you learn to write.

I had tried to get him to answer some questions about the nature of competition itself, and how that’s different in bundles. He dodged that entirely and just chose to use some utterly fantastic (as in fantasy) arguments for how huge the market is and how one bundle can’t possibly fill it… Still, I think the first bit is right on the money. The indie games market is not a zero-sum game.

This is what disappoints me most in my article. I don’t feel like it adequately expressed the nature of the indie market as a cooperative venture. I didn’t have objective figures so I ignored the default setting of 1% going to the humble bundle. That means of $2.3M Humble Bundle only kept 23K. That’s less than PayPal would have taken (PayPal takes too much).

The point here is that though Humble Bundle may be the biggest, they don’t actually make that much. They seem to have genuinely charitable intentions, although they may make more money than that. Who knows? Probably Jeff, but he isn’t talking. If the point of these bundles is not to make money, but to give needed publicity to developers, then they are not a competitive entity. Rather, they are a collective of developers acting as a publisher.

That said, there’s another big thing I glossed over. The Humble Bundle received $4.6M in venture capital. That’s huge, but it may have more to do with the recently confirmed Humble Store. Another possibility is that competition, though not really a problem now, could be a future prospect as Indie Royale and others move in and take a more profit oriented stance. If that happens, it should be signaled by a slowing of growth over two consecutive bundles, and a shrinking sales figure for bundles that don’t compete. Once that happens, all bets are off.

Until then, I restate my claim that until the market ceases to expand, direct competition between bundles will not be an issue, and there’s still room for another indie bundle..

Starting this week, I’m going to be playing around in one MMO and writing a bit on it. The main goal here is to determine what makes a free to play game different than a subscription based product, other than the price tag. The secondary goal is to figure out how games make the paid content rewarding, and if it is balanced with the free stuff.

First off I’ll be doing Lord of the Rings Online. Stay tuned!

• Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
• Team Umizoomi
• The Magic School Bus: Oceans
• Monkey Quest
• Kirby Mass Attack
• Super Mario 3D Land
• Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure
• Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7
• Lego Pirates of the Caribbean
• Professor Layton and the Last Specter

I may have to do a follow up on this. My gut reaction was that the author, Jinny Gudmundsen, had just sort of picked these names out of a hat. I can’t describe how wrong I was without making this article child unfriendly. Though I appreciate the irony, I’d rather spend time telling you about what my 15 minute search for news has told me.

Gudmundsen may be one of the few people who really knows kid’s software. She makes it her bleeding specialty, and runs a site dedicated to it. These games are the best of the best as she’s reviewed them for the past year. Though there are a few games I may have included instead, I can see objections to them. To be honest this is pretty sweet, and if I get the chance you’d better expect an interview to follow. I highly recommend visiting the site (you’ll have to subscribe to read the reviews), but it seems like the relationship between our children and games are getting some much needed positive attention.

Perpetuum received a lot of press due to it’s similarities with CCP’s space sandbox game, and this update brings the two closer into parity with a variety of improvements to the outpost system, altering the dynamic of territory-based PVP. The outposts now have a stability index of from 0-100, which can be raised or lowered based on the success or failure of “intrusion” events. These events are generated every 8-16 hours and occur at the “SAP” (Service Access Points) associated with the outpost. Since there is no way of knowing where the next intrusion event will take place, corporations have to be on their toes if they want to contest an enemy outpost. Determining when the next intrusion event will take place can be determined by scanning the outpost, but this does not apparently reveal at which SAP the event will take place. When an attacker wins an event, the outpost stability will drop. If the defender wins, stability goes up. If stability reaches 0, the outpost is “contested” and will be awarded to the winner of the next intrusion event, with an initial stability of 5.

According to the announcement, this is largely designed to break up “blobs”, which are able to marshal large manpower provided they know where and when. According to the dev blog, this system means that the corporation who wants control has to inhabit the area 24/7 to be assured of outpost ownership. There are some conflicting messages however.

“Since the new system is much more random than before, there has to be ample buffer space, to prevent you needing to stand guard around your SAPs 24/7.”

This seems to conflict with;

Q. Won’t my corp just lose SAPs when they come up in the middle of the night and none of us are on?
A: Absolutely. If you don’t have a presence on the island 24/7, there exists the possibility that your stability level will – over the long term – tend to hover right around the percentage of the time you’re on the island. If you’ve got a presence the 80% of the time, you’ll probably hold right around 80% stability if someone starts challenging you for it. If no one challenges you, the SAPs you miss will despawn in 2 hours, and eventually you’ll raise the stability to 100%. If you lose one overnight, no big deal: your presence on the island will allow you to push it back to 100% soon enough.

Apparently the assumed equation here is that an outposts stability should hover around the percentage of the day the owner inhabits the territory. This sounds like a good thought, but will it work in the game? We’ll see.

Though the primary objections seem to stem from the above confusion of messaging, I worry that a system in a sandbox MMO that is essentially based on random chance will not be sufficiently involving for the player. These random intrusion events are exactly that. Random. The fact is the gaming lives of the defenders will revolve around making sure they are on when the next event occurs. The attackers will get to pick when they take advantage of intrusions, and the rest of the time, they just won’t care. This seems to me like a system that places a burden on the defenders that they will justifiably blame on the developers. Outposts with lower stability will give lower benefits; if players loose their hard-earned benefits, event if they keep the outposts, will have a pretty good reason to be miffed at this system.

Will it work? The jury’s out for now, but since Perpetuum have been snapping up EVE subscribers by the thousands over the past year, they have their own territory to guard. And with the game reaching an important 1st year milestone, they are placing a pretty high bet on this system working.

Go is a simple game. That’s a lie, but it seems true if you look at the basic information needed to play it. It is played on a square board with a grid drawn on it. You take turns placing little black and white stones at the intersection points, and if you surround your opponent’s stones with stones of your color, they are removed. The player in control of the most open spaces at the end of the game wins. That’s it. That’s all there is to Go. And there’s that nasty lie again.

Playing go is not so simple. From start to finish you have virtually limitless possibilities. At the start you can place a stone anywhere on the board. The game ends when there are no more legal moves, or both players pass on their move.

The learning curve this presents is astounding. Empty spaces next to a stone are called “liberties”. A stone with no liberties is “captured”, and is removed from the board. Stones placed next to each other are called groups, and share liberties. From these rules, a number of patterns arise that form the heart of the game. Spotting the patterns, and applying them correctly, is the key to success.

In my understanding, a mechanic is a means by which the player interacts with the environment. In go, the mechanics are the placement and capture of stones. The rules govern those mechanics. You alter your game environment by putting stones down. The rules determine what effect that has on the environment. The goal is to alter the environment in such a way that you control more territory than your opponent; surrounding bits of the board with groups that cannot be captured.

The rules, then, are the limitations placed upon your ability to put a stone down. To my current knowledge, there is only one- you cannot place a stone in a position in which it will automatically be captured. If an opponent has a space surrounded, you can’t place a stone there unless you are capturing with that move. Consequently, if you have a group of stones that surrounds two separate open spaces, that group cannot be captured, as no single move can occupy both liberties.

This gets very very complicated. There are any number of patterns that will produce these open spaces, called “eyes”, and make capture impossible. The depth of gameplay this offers is immense. The game is so simple that it leaves the environment open as a vast desert inhabited only by the possibilities afforded by the imagination of the player.

Let’s compare this with the old school first person shooter. Back before the puzzles of half-life, and the reactive environments of Duke Nukem 3D, an FPS was a maze with a series of NPCs that served as obstacles. The goal was to get to the end of the maze. You could run, shoot, jump, and maybe push a few buttons. In short, you had four mechanics.

Pretty doggone simple, right? Then you get to the rules.

Rules tell you how fast you can run. Rules tell you how much damage you can take, how much ammo you can hold, how many guns you can carry, and what kind of damage they do. Rules tell you how the baddies react to you, how barrels explode, and if you drown in water or if you burn in lava. The rules are the thousand little things you never think about in a game because they are tacitly implied by your environment. A new player in go will have to have the rules explained. The only thing a player needs to know when sitting down with an FPS is what the controls are. There may be other mechanics stuck in there if it’s a squad based thing, or has some RPG stuff thrown in there, but as far as classic shooters go, it’s all pretty intuitive. “Here is a gun. Shoot things. Don’t die.” No one has ever needed that much instruction.

When we say the mechanics of a game feel off, we are almost certainly talking about the rules. People complaining about a stealth mechanic are almost always (I say almost because there may be an exception I don’t know about) talking about the rules governing that mechanic. They mean there is a mechanic, and the rules did not connect it to the environment in a way they found convincing or enjoyable. Why are all those useless items you pick up in RPGs so frustrating? Because the mechanics allow you to have them, but there are no rules let you use them through the existing mechanics. It means there is something in the environment you should be able to manipulate with the tools you have, but the rules don’t let you. That is nothing short of poor game design.

If we stopped for a moment and thought about the best games we’ve played on the PC, it should  become apparent that they’d work pretty well as a board game. In fact, most of them do have something of a board game equivalent. The trouble is that so many games you get in the computerized world don’t really cut it as games, or are the same game played on a different board and with slightly different rules. The joy of video games is that they allow the game itself to fade into the background and the environment to take center stage. When designers forget what their mechanics are for, or have arbitrary rules that prevent you from using those mechanics to participate in the game world, it all falls apart. Games are about new environments, new worlds to explore. Mechanics are just the handle on the door to that experience.

The relevance to this here blog? Well in the next few months I’m going to be moving this to my own domain name, and probably tweaking the layout a bit. Not only has Quintin Smith caused me to submit myself to the possibilities of PC games writing, but he and Robert Florence have made me want to take a look at board games. There is some great stuff out there, and if you like thinking about what goes into a game then you really should be spending more time playing them at your table. The mechanics are much easier to spot as such, but without being too obtrusive. Usually.

So I’ll be writing about board games? Not much news there. But I’m also going to be talking about various projects I’m working on, and well, just writing. This means I’m actually going to treat this like, well, a Blog.

So what can you expect? More variety for one. I’m back in school again, and I’ll probably be sticking some of that writing up for general consumption. I’m also working on a few startup projects, and as those become more developed you can come here for some inside information. In any event, thanks to all of you mighty throng who have been checking the site for the past few weeks, and I hope you like the new and improved Thinkings.