Downtown Interconnects

This might be my naivate, but a recent Slashdot article brought to mind an idea I’d had back at a technology startup I used to work for.

The whole idea behind some of the basic technologies that the Internet is built on is that there is no center. But everyone who actually uses the Internet is a client of an ISP—they’re “downstream” from the “backbone.”

But the more I see and understand about how things work, the more I wonder why businesses in a metropolitan center don’t interconnect. A single dry pair with a T1 link between two businesses with competently configured routing would effectively give both businesses the benefits of a redundant network link.

If you had more businesses, and arranged the connections between them intelligently, you’d come to the point where only a complete failure of all links out of the business district would sever any of the participating businesses. Granted, we’re assuming mutiple carriers into the participant’s networks, and that their service agreements don’t prevent the plan…

And while technically, it would be quite feasible, commercially perhaps not. Consider how difficult it is to put together a simple peering agreement between two companies whose business it is to work with data networking. How do you seriously propose to arrange for a dozen businesses whose competencies lie outside that arena to arrange the transactions, much less manage the service. (Bringing in a broker company might or might not help.)

At some point this does become practical. When businesses are getting smaller, when each company does a particular thing and does it well, and they need to communicate quickly with the companies across town, not with the head office across the globe. When network links become faster, and more ubiquitus, and easier to come by. And that time might be coming soon.

At least, I’d like to see it.

A Resolution Mechanic Looking for a Premise

Hey, this is the game designer’s Other Vice. (The first being Abstract Theory.) I was listening to a piece on NPR, and the story is building around this budding romance, and the plotter in me is seeing that what we want most is for this American-born Iraqi POW to get together with the cute truck driving corporel. Which means, says the plotter, that they cannot get together yet.

From whence was born this mechanic. Granted some kind of actual conflict, with real stakes and all that, the table votes on how they as players, as audience members and story writers, want the thing to go. There’s some gears-and-axles to encourage splits and tricksy voting – off the cuff, I’d say that winning voters get a point for each loser. Better still: the conflict initiator gets the product of winners times losers, so you’re pressed to chose conflicts that will split the table.

So the winning side of the conflict becomes Comedy, and the losing side is Tragedy. If Comedy is a unanimous vote, then Tragedy happens. Otherwise, magic? Roll for it, or spend the points you’ve been getting to force Comedy, or Comedy always happens unless it’s unanimous.

Honestly, I think the concept needs to be explored a little better, and that the answer to what happens probably follows pretty clearly from a combination of the concept and whatever premise the system is serving.

Game Design Theory Question

One worthy observation that’s been made on the indie design circuit is the distinct divisions drawn between components of the game. It’s a worthwhile thing to recognize that there’s a difference between player and character: that the player might want things for their character that their character really wouldn’t want. We’ve played that way for years, but new games are actually written that way.

Structural elements that have been identified are situation, scenes, and conflicts. But ultimately are situations, scenes and conflicts really different?

What I’m suggesting is that there’s a thing I’ll term a story element. A story element comprises some kind of a set up – some situation that needs to be resolved. Story elements can be composed of smaller elements. It’s entirely possible that a story element might be added into a larger element. The resolution of an element could be determined merely mechanically, or as the result of the resolutions of it’s sub-events.

How does this relate? Basically, situation is a big story element: it comprises the basic tension of at least a full session of play. It’s composed of several mid-sized story elements (scenes). Each one of the scenes is composed of one or more conflicts, which might be composed of tasks.

What I’m arguing here, from my computer science perspective, is that from point of view of an element, they’re functionally very similar. It’s probably useful to distinguish element-as-situation from element-as-task, but in terms of viewing a game as a way to manipulate a tree of setup-resolution boxes, I think there might be something to considering story-elements as a general class of things.

One consequence is that you get the freedom to subdivide elements as far down as you want to go, and to lay off when you want to.

Any way, this has turned out pretty high-flown, and I’d love to have a more concrete example of how this might work, but I think I need to wrap this one up and go back to fevered theorizing.

More noodling

Here’s a complete throwaway idea and a design exercise.

Throwaway idea: Situation consists of a set of issues that must be resolved. Characters can’t ignore them, either because of the game premise, or because they’re tied directly to the characters. None should be simple to resolve. In fact, I’d go one further: if you can see a way to resolve the issue, it’s not a game-term Issue. Scene framing involves picking one of the issues and presenting it’s next manifestation. Some kind of time pressure forces brevity in scenes, so the particular problem relating to the Issue may not be fully realized before some kind of action is taken. The next scene related to this Issue will be influenced by how this problem got resolved though.

The idea is inspired by crisis-mode media like Battlestar Galactica and Alan Moore’s Top Ten (in turn inspired by Hill Street Blues and its similars). Specifically, the way that a set of plot arcs interrelate in each episode, and the various situations interact.

Design exercise: first of all, I’m finding that thinking in terms of little RPG sketches is particularly satisfying. I like all these little ideas that skitter around one’s metaphorical ankles. But they won’t get out the door without some development. So, the exercise is to bring to a play-testable state each of these ideas. Or at least some of them. Maybe a Game Chef with myself thing, or if someone else is willing, I’ll do several iterations of this. Could easily be 4 a year, with playtest, seems to me.

In terms of “what is playtestable” I tend to think that the whole thing could be pretty spare. A Game Chef style 15 page splat of sketchy rules, complete with cop-out freeform traits. (As distinct from valid freeform … separate entry.)

Dogs Versus Shadows

Playing Dogs in the Vineyard recently, I had a sudden realization about how it works. I mean, it’s there in the book, plain as day, but it took having a certain design-focused view to get it.

The realization is like this: Traits and Relationships in Dogs work like Keys or BITs do in Shadows of Yesterday and Burning Wheel. In one way, they work better, in theory: the Traits are good for driving conflicts in a particular direction, and Relationships drive the story in a particular direction.

Now on the one hand, Traits do this without explicit reward. If you hit the Trait, you get the dice. The bigger the dice, the more you want to hit the Trait. So that’s the reinforcement on the Trait.

But it gets weird if Traits are too broad, or if you don’t understand how your Traits work when you make your character.

And I find myself dubious about how well Relationships work with the Dogs premise of making decisions of morality. Does it make sense to commit to a Relationship with a character in a town that you might not be back to? In some ways, it might make more sense to relate to the other PCs, or to organizations (The Dogs, the Faith, the TA, the Mountain People), or sins or demons. Which then does serve as a guide for the story.

All of this musing has gotten me off the track. What I’m specifically fascinated by is that Dogs manages to accomplish what The Shadow of Yesterday does very directly with Keys and XP, in a very elegant, indirect way.

Agent Kujan's Scene Framing Mechanic

This is a toy role playing game, purpose of which is to suggest a scene framing rule. I don’t know if the rule would make for a fun game, or if the whole thing would just crash. But here it is:

The Custom Agent’s Office
A Toy Role Playing Game

So, everyone chooses a character, name, some background. Definitely a goal of some kind: where they want their character to go, or succeed at or whatever.

Pick someone at random, they frame a scene, and start playing it out. Can be anything that player wants. From then on, other players can jump in on the current scene and express their incredulity. They then have to frame a new scene around the details of their doubt.

(Right? The idea is that the interrupter is Agent Kujan from The Usual Suspects. “I don’t buy it.” “Convince me, show me every last detail.”)

So the idea, very strongly inspired by Mr. Baker, is that on the one hand, you have credibility. Each player has the right to doubt, and revoke credibility in the scene. That’s the purpose that a resolution mechanic serves.

What that’s connected to is a scene framing mechanic. You revoke your credence at the cost of framing a new scene – or with the benefit of the new scene I suppose.

One of the things that results, I think, is that it’s a winning strategy to bring other characters into a scene, because their players will be more likely to buy into a scene that they’re a part of. Or, if nothing else, they may be too distracted playing the scene to doubt it.

The obvious break that I see is if everyone’s goals are unrelated, or aren’t in conflict. On the other hand if the goals can’t be reconciled, then who’s going to extend credibility in the first place?

It needs a bit more substance before it could be played, but I think it’s worthy of the extra effort.