Blog of the Round Table: The denouement of the rings

The role-playing game, as a genre, owes much to the imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien. The same could be said for much of the fantasy genre in film and literature as well, but the diversity of approaches in these media reflects intricate linkages to multiple concepts of fantasy and folklore. Role-playing games, which build lengthy, epic storylines in fantasy worlds populated by multiple sentient races, follow in the footsteps of Tolkien's magnum opus. In terms of the time investment and the breadth of the imagined world, many RPGs are quite similar to The Lord of the Rings, but while that trilogy keeps going for several chapters after the climactic fight with the forces of Sauron, a game typically stops dead after its most intense battle, with ill effects for both character arcs and the closure of the story. Since they've taken so much from Tolkien already, perhaps games could look to his last chapters to find inspiration for gameplay beyond the climactic fight.

Let's begin by considering the case of Eowyn and Faramir, two characters who are slowly falling in love during the late phases of The Return of the King. Their stories effectively end with a scene in which Faramir confesses his love and asks Eowyn to consider him. It's not particularly realistic, but RPGs that have a particular focus on relationships and the use of conversation trees (Mass Effect, for instance) could take a cue from this. A relationship that has developed slowly over the course of the game could be realized in the aftermath of the final battle. Obviously, you could make this dependent on successful navigation of a conversation tree. In a game like Mass Effect that links conversational proficiency with actions and attitudes during the game, making this tree impossible for a particular alignment could be a way to emphasize the personal cost of the decisions that have been made.

As part of his closing arc, Aragorn, who is concerned about his ability to maintain Gondor in the future, is led by Gandalf into the mountains, where he finds a seedling offspring of the sacred tree Nimloth, symbolizing the rebirth of the nation. This is, essentially, the novelization of a fetch quest, and a gameplay denouement of this kind would require some extra elbow grease to be emotionally effective. However, if an appropriate symbol is developed throughout a game, then a mission to retrieve that symbol could be a good way to bring closure to an epic RPG. Having defeated the great enemy, you find an object that matters personally to the characters and implies hope for the future.

The hobbits have the most elaborate denouement, in the form of their journey back to the Shire, and the elimination of the forces endangering it. This approach has several advantages, which are shared between trilogy and game. Firstly, many interesting characters are developed at the beginning of the story who must necessarily be left behind when the journey at the core of it begins. Returning to those characters reminds the player (or reader) of the things that seized his interest back when he started. Additionally, seeing the central characters in the presence of the initial supporting cast again provides a yardstick for measuring their increase in maturity, confidence, and power. Because RPGs, particularly of the Japanese variety, are often concerned with the maturation of the hero as a parallel to his leveling up, this is an effective way to reflect on the implications of the game as a whole.

The triviality of the destruction of the forces of the Shire displays the newfound strength and leadership of the hobbits of the Fellowship, but it also points out another possibility for closing out a story. For some reason it is typical to have the final boss or the leader of the opposing forces be some immensely powerful warrior, but this need not be the case. You could set up a story where a relatively weak king is supported by an army of incredibly powerful soldiers. Defeating his minions could be tough, but the king himself could be a trivial boss. The climactic battle could come much earlier than the final fight, with the last battle in the game serving as an expression of a new power relationship in the world. Something along these lines occurred near the end of Final Fantasy X, where the real climax of that game is the battle against Yunalesca and the bosses within Sin constitute various moments of farewell, although admittedly some of these fights are not easy.

The final phase of The Lord of the Rings that I want to draw attention to is the departure of the ringbearers from the Grey Havens, symbolizing their passage into the next life. Characters in RPGs often die as a part of the story, or occasionally (as in the Fire Emblem games) perish permanently if they fall in battle. A journey to carry their spirits to the next world, or simply to return their bodies to their home villages, could provide gameplay that puts those losses in context. One could also make the bodies a physical burden in some way, making this journey more difficult in a Lonesome Dove kind of way.

Of course, these various approaches could also be combined in various ways to provide a closing chapter that follows the climactic boss. My point here is not that The Lord of the Rings is the apotheosis of effective denouement in fantasy storytelling. However, the way it ties up its character arcs contains a number of ideas for developing a more interesting closing to an RPG story than just a cutscene followed by a credit scroll. Extending the gameplay beyond the climactic boss offers the opportunity to put a satisfying cap on the character and world development, and thus make the whole story a richer and more rewarding experience.

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Blog of the Round Table: Garden of Eden

In the April Blogs of the Round Table, Corvus asks us to design a game about a social issue we personally find troubling. There have been several stellar entries already, which you should check out from the main hall or using the pull-down menu at the end. Be aware that the subject matter of some of these games is fairly disturbing and may not be appropriate for all readers. My own design is rated E, because it is a light little planting sim I'll call Garden of Eden, which is a metaphor about sustainability and resource consumption.

The Design

In Garden of Eden, a player attempts to create the most aesthetically pleasing garden possible with a limited set of resources. The garden consists of several equally-sized patches of soil that the player chooses to seed with certain plants. Each plant requires a certain richness of dirt. The player can increase the richness of each patch's dirt by adding topsoil or fertilizer. By adding these elements the player can enrich the soil; every season of growth depletes the soil. The garden receives a score every season. So long as this score increases which each successive garden, or decreases by a small amount, the game continues. If the score falls by too much for 2-3 consecutive seasons the player is fired and the game ends. An online leaderboard built into the game interface shows high scores.

At the beginning of the game, the player has 8 patches under his control, and 16 different kinds of plant that he can grow (4 for each different season). The player has a warehouse containing a large but finite number of sacks of fertilizer and topsoil. A set number of these sacks (more topsoil than fertilizer) are deposited in hoppers on screen each season, and the player can move them from the hopper to a patch in order to enrich that patch of soil. Topsoil can only enrich the soil to a certain level, but fertilizer can enrich it infinitely. The only limit on soil richness, therefore, is the number of fertilizer bags in the hopper. The richness of each patch can be represented to the player either as a number or by the color of the soil.

Each plant requires a certain minimum soil richness to grow, and at this level will produce small flowers and a baseline score. Plants can be placed in soil that is too poor, but they will die and give no score. Making the soil richer than the minimum will produce a plant with more and larger flowers, and a much higher score. The return on investment is non-linear: enriching by X amount will increase the score by X^1.5 or more, up to the maximum available for a particular kind of plant. The minimum and maximum scores for each plant are known to the player, as is the amount of soil richness needed to achieve these scores.

Once the soil has been adjusted and the plants chosen for each patch, the plants grow to full bloom over the course of about 30 seconds. At this point the player can pause to admire his garden, or move to the next season. Higher-scoring gardens are always more interesting to look at — the plants themselves are larger, more detailed, and more beautiful. In addition, high-scoring gardens draw animals such as singing birds, deer, butterflies and bees, and human visitors who ooh and aah over the garden. Once a season is completed, the now-dead plants are removed into a rubbish bin. The player can choose to move them from there to a composting heap; after one additional season each plant left there will turn into one bag of topsoil. The intrinsic richness of the soil in each patch will decrease, and the cycle begins again.

With a high enough seasonal score or net score (added up across all seasons), new plants become available: these plants always have higher soil richness requirements, and also give higher scores with the same degree of non-linearity as soil enrichment. The player is shown when he will receive a new plant. The scores required are low initially so that new plants come rapidly, but as the game progresses it requires a higher and higher score to get a new plant. The player's highest-scoring season is also recorded on an online leaderboard, but it is not stored permanently. The score is only on the board as long as the player's game continues. The score is also removed temporarily after a few minutes (say, 10) of inactivity. The player sees the top ten, as well as his own position on the leaderboard and the 10 players who flank his score.

At a certain point, new patches become available, always delivered in groups of 16 — there are 5 extra groups of patches. Each time you receive one you get a one-time delivery of additional fertilizer and topsoil to the warehouse. In addition, because you now have more patches of soil overall, your hopper contains proportionally more fertilizer and topsoil sacks. This means that the maximum enrichment possible for a given patch of soil increases. It also means that more fertilizer and topsoil are removed from the warehouse each season. Something must be planted on every patch you have, and that plants on these new patches only count half as much towards your score as plants on your original patch. Additionally, the intrinsic soil richness of these patches depletes more quickly than the player's original 8 patches. The player cannot choose to refuse new patches.

Obviously the fertilizer will eventually run out, and as the intrinsic strength of the soil gets depleted the return from composting will not match the investment of topsoil needed to grow anything. If the player manages things properly he can quite easily keep the scoring decline slow enough that the game continues indefinitely. Once a section of soil is completely depleted and the player has no more topsoil, the game runs on its own. The soil in the six different groups of patches becomes cracked, dry, and barren as the seasons continue. The original set of 8 patches expands to take the shape of North America; the other groups of 16 patches, as they dry out, fill in a Mercator projection map of the earth. Once this happens the game ends; the player loses. If, however, the player manages to run the game for a very large number of turns, then he is told that he has won, and his best garden score from that game is permanently entered in the leaderboard. At no point prior to winning the game is the player told that this outcome is possible.

Aims of the Design

The game is meant to describe the problem (not a solution) of sustainability. In the metaphor fertilizer represents non-renewable resources and topsoil represents mostly-renewable resources. The composting process represents recycling efforts — the player must make a conscious mental effort to compost, and the recovery of resources is not totally efficient, in that many resources are lost and composting only returns the less powerful topsoil, not new fertilizer. The mechanics associated with the additional patches of soil represent a global drain of resources from poorer to richer nations, here represented by the currently-worst offender (the USA).

The mechanics of the game are meant to encourage the player to value a high-scoring garden with large, rich plants that suck down resources. This value is communicated to the player by the direct presentation (more beautiful garden, more visitors, more interesting sounds) and also socially, via the ever-present leaderboard. The requirement that the player actively interact with the game in order to keep himself on the leaderboard is meant to increase the volatility of the board, but also to keep each individual game moving forward. Additionally, ever-increasing growth or carefully controlled losses are valued by the game (by allowing progression).

Contemporary values romanticize the idea of a continuous march of progress, in which our success as a society is measured by how much bigger or better our things are compared to the things previous generations had. This is not just a view that informs our attitude towards technology, although it is most evident there; it also informed our latest real-estate disaster and the associated plague of suburban sprawl. The game is meant to communicate the idea that these values are self-defeating in a world of finite resources. Even if a small area can be sustained at a high level, this can only be achieved by taking resources from other areas at the cost of making their standard of life lower. Ideally I would tune the game so that it would be possible for a dedicated and careful player to run a modest garden indefinitely. To achieve this kind of success, or to "win" the game, the player must reject the "bigger, better" values implicit in the design. Because the game means to infect the player with these values, the upshot is to make the player question himself.

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Blog of the Round Table: Hero's Blade

For the February Blogs of the Round Table, Corvus asks us to take a design provided by another contributor for the January Round Table and build on it. The idea is to develop a similar theme or mood in this second game, without necessarily remaining true (or relevant) to the literary work that inspired the initial pre-make post. In that vein, I wanted to riff off Corvus' "A Lego Orange" with an eye primarily towards its endgame. At that point he's trying to get across a sense of disenchantment with a once-loved lifestyle, which is what I'm going for in this idea for an unconventional fantasy RPG called Hero's Blade.

Hero's Blade is set in a fairly large valley with a road running through it. There's a village at the center and several outlying farms, a forest area, and a few fields and streams. The player controls an older hero in the "grizzled ranger" mode, armed with an excellent sword and bow, good armor, and so on. The game begins as the Hero wakes up in the village inn, learning that he got a knock on the head during a landslide that has blocked the road at one end of the valley. Don't worry, he doesn't have amnesia. The road at the other end has recently been taken over by bandits, so he is trapped in the valley until the road is cleared or he removes the bandits. The game world should at this point be presented in desaturated colors, as if the player is looking at the world through a filter that gives everything a gray tinge. Other than this, the graphics should be standard realistic 3D stuff.

The inhabitants of the valley are all farmers and, with one exception, are neither willing nor able to fight the thieves on their own. The exception is a single character (who I'll call the Kid) who is eager to go out and get rid of the bandits. He (or she) should have similar armaments to the Hero, but of much lower quality. The Kid is a very unskilled and totally untrained fighter, but possesses the same set of combat skills as the Hero. Combat in the game is turn-based and perfunctory — as little removed from a classic turn-based model as possible. There are no magical items or magic users, no elemental strength/weakness system, no need for any kind of strategy. The Hero's abilities are so far above those of the bandits that one of them can only stand against him for a turn or two. He earns no experience from battle at all. By contrast, the Kid starts off as a pretty bad fighter and earns experience points and skill boosts as is typical for an RPG. The Kid is AI-controlled, aggressive, and foolhardy; the Hero's only means of controlling him is a command that can knock the Kid down and take him out of the battle for a few turns. If either the Kid or the Hero dies in combat the game ends.

Each turn of combat and each bandit killed desaturates the color palette by a certain fixed percentage. If the saturation drops below a certain level, the game whites out, then fades to a steel-gray color and ends. This cutoff applies without respect to bonuses based on relationships or locations (see below). Thus, a player can get a game over by walking into the cemetery.

While the valley has several places where the bandits patrol, the rest of it is fairly open and features no real threats. The Hero can converse with the inhabitants of the village and the farm, and can establish relationships with each (about 50 total). Early stages of building a relationship involve just talking with the inhabitants, using a conversation system that allows the player to convey an attitude towards the NPC. For the most part these NPCs will do their own daily tasks without seeking out the Hero. The exception is the Kid, who can never be found if you're looking for him, but appears immediately if you call him (using a button solely dedicated to this task in the open world). The Kid always shows up out of nowhere to join in or watch if the Hero enters a fight or does a job that might be related to fighting or adventuring. As the Hero's relationship with an NPC improves, the inhabitant will offer quests to the player, some of them minor and some of them more involved, but never requiring combat. Several characters will also offer jobs.

These side-quests and jobs should take be the focus of the development. Each job should have some depth of gameplay, so that it carefully rewards strategy and player skill. Also, there should be some degree of challenge to each of them. Similarly, each quest should have extended moments of interaction between the character and the world. For instance, if an NPC has a missing cow, the player's job will be to find the cow and then guide it back carefully by coaxing it along and constantly nudging it in one direction or another. The goal is to require continual input from the player during each of these quests while varying significantly from quest to quest so that the player is always engaged during them (as opposed to the combat).

The performance of each job or sidequest will be discretized in some way so that as the Hero does more of each the colors of the world increase in saturation. Similarly, each time the Hero "levels up" his relationship with one of the NPCs, he the world saturates. In addition, NPCs with whom the Hero has a very good relationship will boost the color saturation in nearby areas. Spending time near his friends will literally make the Hero's day brighter. Only the Kid does not have this effect.

Taking a relationship with an NPC to a certain level will cause the Hero to open up to the NPC, with the Hero revealing some of his past. These flashbacks should take the form of slideshows of images illustrated in striking style and vibrant color, voiced over by the Hero narrating the event from his life. The life events he narrates will take a variety of tones, appropriate to the history and nature of the NPC. However, each of them will have a sad epilogue. His old friends have all died in battle, the women he danced with in taverns across the land have settled down and forgotten him, he outlived his favorite horse, etc. etc. The image shown in each epilogue should use the washed-out palette from the start of the game.

Taking a relationship to a high level will also help keep the Hero from dying by whiteout. In cases where the game would normally end due to the color desaturation, a good friend can find the Hero and boost the saturation level back to safety.

All of this is meant to make combat an unattractive thing to do, but after every couple of days that the Hero does not find and fight a bandit in the valley, the raiders will become emboldened and attack the town. If the Hero does not decimate them, one of the villagers will be killed. On the day after the attack, any bandits or villagers killed will be buried in the town cemetery in a scripted event; depending on who is getting buried the Hero's attendance or non-attendance will affect his relationship with all the NPCs. In the vicinity of the cemetery itself (as well as the bandit hideout) the color desaturates by a certain fixed amount.

In addition to these spots, the color will desaturate at any spot outside of the village where the Hero killed a bandit previously. These will be easily identified because the bodies will persist, slowly decaying with time. In town, bandits killed indoors will leave permanent bloodstains. No matter how faint the rest of the world gets these will always be clearly visible; they will fade to black rather than white.

The population of bandits is finite, however, and once they get reduced to about a fifth of their initial number they will hole up in their little fort and start sending out individuals to burn farms or kill villagers while the Hero is too far away to help. At this point the Hero will be urged to attack their stronghold. If he refuses to go, the Kid will go by himself and die there; the game ends. If the Hero accepts, the villagers will contrive a way to make the bandits open their fort and the Hero and Kid will take them on. The "boss" bandit leader is only marginally more skilled than the bandits themselves.

After this fight, victory celebration, yada yada yada, the Hero is awakened one morning by the Kid, who says that he is going to leave the valley and adventure across the world. The player can choose either "I'll go with you" or "You should take my sword." For the first option, the Hero's better friends drop by and say farewell. The Hero will start to walk out of the valley with the Kid at his heels, and the player's ability to redirect his motions will gradually diminish. As they pass by the bandit hideout, the player loses control entirely. A few straggling bandits attack shortly thereafter, with both the Hero and the Kid being completely scripted. Each turn desaturates the view significantly, and when the bandits are defeated in the 5th turn or so the screen whites out. Game Over.

If the player chooses the second option, however, the camera leaves the Hero behind and starts to follow the Kid, who is not yet in the control of the player. The colors return to the same washed-out look they had at the beginning of the game. As the Kid gets closer to the bandit hideout, however, the palette becomes more vibrant. As he continues on past, the saturation increases. When the bandits attack, the player is finally given control of him; at this point the Kid is better than them by a fair margin. Each turn of combat increases color saturation, as does each kill. After he triumphs, the Kid looks away from the valley into the very bright and vibrant lands beyond. Heroic music; game over.

The thing I'm really going for in this idea is the weariness of the Hero. He's good at fighting, much better by far than anyone in the valley. Once upon a time he found combat thrilling, but now it's lost whatever luster it had. He's tired of killing, but he's trapped in a particular life by the sword. The desaturation of colors with each moment of combat and each kill represents his growing weariness and depression. The combat is intentionally made un-fun and un-rewarding to encourage the player to feel the same way about it that the character does. The life the Hero finds in the valley refreshes and revitalizes him, hence the increased color, and so the conversations, jobs, and sidequests should be made rewarding and engaging to encourage a similar feeling in the player. The Hero finds one last use for his fighting skills and then passes his sword along to the Kid, who resembles the Hero's younger self in his outlook. Or, the Hero allows his spirit to fade and consigns himself to an empty life he has grown to hate. The choice at the end isn't really about player input, but about asking the player to reflect on his experience in the game and correctly identify what the character values.

Obviously, I'm also tweaking a couple of things about RPGs here. A typical RPG would be about the fresh-faced Kid who has made a decision to go out into the world and have adventures, and this bit back home in the valley with the weak enemies would just be the first chapter. The pointless monotony of combat grind is also something I'm trying to get at with the desaturation and the first ending to the game. Of course, this could end up just being a collection of minigames with a story attached, but that might be refreshing in its own right.

Please visit this month's other entries:

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Dark Age

Since Corvus decided to open the floodgates to second submissions for this month's Blogs of the Round Table, I thought I'd add another design idea to the pile. As a reminder, the topic of the month was to "pre-imagine" a game for a work of literature, i.e. a game that might have inspired a classic novel, play, etc. For the second submission, Corvus requested that we pre-imagine a vastly different kind of game, for a vastly different kind of work. As my previous proposal was for an expressive browser-based game to inspire the E. E. Cummings poem "l(a", I will now propose Dark Age, a turn-based strategy game meant to inspire one of my favorite works of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

One could probably generate this game as an extensive mod of a Civilization, because really the idea is Civ in reverse. The game has a similar set up: a tiled world map dotted with many cities. Most terrain tiles that are suitable for agriculture have already been irrigated; most tiles that possess mineral resources already have mines. Before the first turn of the game this whole map is clearly revealed, and the civilization is relatively advanced. In the first turn, the "Civilization" collapses, leaving each metropolis as an independent city-state. The player's city-state is situated at a relatively lush site at the edge of this civilization that is poor in the mineral resources needed to develop a military. The player's task is to preserve his civilization, its knowledge, and its technology.

In order to successfully achieve this goal, the player must maintain his population, gather resources, preserve recorded knowledge, and defend himself from popular overthrow or military conquest. The knowledge level of the civilization is represented by a simple number. Particular kinds of knowledge and technologies are lost or gained in a set, specific sequence based on the knowledge number. Each turn of the game will also introduce a "fog of war" effect on the world map, slowly shrinking knowledge of the world until it encompasses only those areas directly under the control of the player.

Maintaining the population requires agricultural planning; time in the game is resolved seasonally, and the player must assign sufficient population to the fields in each season to feed everyone. The population can also be assigned to public works, military duty, or staffing buildings. In addition to manpower, the agricultural system responds to the climate. This operates in nested cycles -- a seasonal cycle within a larger cycle of wet and dry years within an even larger cycle of warm and cold eras. The wet/dry and warm/cold cycles will start off following a set pattern that is the same in every game. The player's agricultural success will rely on his ability to stockpile sufficient food during times of plenty (warm/wet) to last him during hard times (cold/dry). The player can also gather timber and stone to construct buildings that allow stockpiling (granary), decrease annual population loss (hospital, nunnery), and increase agricultural production (stable, blacksmith, cathedral). The city starts with a church, and by telling his local prelate to focus on themes of chastity or fruitfulness the player can roughly adjust the birth rate, but there is a lag of several years between sermon and population. Several years of famine or high disease rates (due to overpopulation) will lead to your overthrow, ending the game.

Preserving recorded knowledge requires "free population" (e.g. people who are not assigned to the military, agriculture, or construction) and support buildings. The player begins with a library, which requires a modest staff year-round but slowly loses knowledge. Optional buildings include a monastery, which requires a very low staff but loses knowledge more rapidly, a school which requires a modest staff and a library, but grows knowledge at a rate equal to the library's loss rate. Other buildings which increase or preserve knowledge may include a grand library, alchemical laboratory, and university. Some of these buildings cannot be constructed without a minimum population in the player's empire. If the knowledge number drops too far, then the game ends.

Certain technologies will be more easily lost or regained based on resources, most of which will have to be acquired through trade. The lack of metal will be the greatest immediate problem. Surrounding cities will lose technologies very quickly; the player can trade his civilization's knowledge for their resources. Despite their minimal technology the nearby states will have strong militaries. Trading with only one of them will cause other states to attack, but the states will not ally with each other so trading with several states will cause them to stand off or fight each other instead of you. Assuming you can gather enough mineral resources you can of course conquer these states, but moving population into your military means that you can't use it to preserve knowledge or grow food. However, each city-state has a "native knowledge" number; if you are trading with that state and their native knowledge falls too far below the player's knowledge, then they will overthrow their leader and join your empire.

Tactics required for trade negotiation and diplomacy will differ in a predictable way based on the local tyrant's personality; dialogue cues will reveal what this personality is with a clear 1 to 1 correspondence that is the same in every game. For each personality of tyrant there will be a predictable way to progress from enemy to trading partner to master. Although the precise location of nearby city-states will differ from game to game based on the map, the personality of the rulers of the first-encountered city-states will be the same in every game. As the player's empire grows larger the hostility of his neighbors will increase. Obviously, angering your neighbors to the point that they conquer you will cause the game to end.

The game will keep track of how well the player is doing and what methods he is using to expand his empire. In the early part of the game, the player will receive copious hints and tips about what is coming. The game will, for instance, give him hints about the larger climate cycles and the correct steps to take for a given personality of a rival ruler. At a certain point, based on time or an assessment of progress, the game throws a crisis at the player, which varies based on the player's style. For instance, if the player has primarily used a diplomatic/trade approach to winning the game, several nearby cities will unite into a military empire and declare war on the player, rapidly moving to conquer his territories. If the player has been using military force to expand, a debilitating plague will sweep through his cities over a period of years, decimating the population. There should be a wide suite of possibilities, including civil war, protracted famine, the burning of key intellectual facilities, simultaneous exhaustion of multiple resources, etc.

At this point all of the cycles and predictability that governed the first half of the game will be expunged and replaced. The climate will shift to a new cycle, responses to social engineering will change, libraries will become less effective, external city-states will become more resistant to the player, the cues for particular personality types will change, and the pattern of progression to conquer a city-state under a given personality will also shift. These will all still follow predictable patterns and cycles, but the rules will differ significantly from the earlier play segment. All the new behaviors will be chosen randomly, from highly degenerate sets when possible. The game will no longer give hints or tips of any kind, except a single warning that the behavior of "some" systems "may" have changed.

Winning the game involves keeping the civilization's knowledge at or above the game-start level for a set period of time after the crisis, conquering the entire map, or pushing the knowledge level to the maximum.

The Foundation series begins with a society meant to preserve knowledge in the face of a decline and eventual collapse of a galaxy-wide empire. Threatened by their neighbors, who are already sinking into barbarism, the Foundation survives by playing them off each other using a faux-religious trade in knowledge, then conquers them through their dependence on that knowledge. The reason for their success is careful planning by a man named Hari Seldon who is able to scientifically predict the future in general terms. In later novels, the Seldon plan is thrown off by an unpredictable crisis created by a psychic mutant, and then rescued by a secret "Second Foundation" of psychics. Then a great deal of work goes into steering the Foundation back onto the course laid out by Seldon initially.

I wanted to capture the secure feeling of knowing the future via easily predictable patterns reinforced by copious hints in the early stages, as well as the defensive footing of the early Foundation. The shock and confusion of the seemingly unpredictable crisis upends this feeling of security and inevitability. A new trepidation about the future is then reinforced by the altered patterns of the second half of the game and the absence of tips from the program itself. The goal is also a sort of poke in the eye at FAQs, the point being to make the generation of new behaviors so complex that it is more work to read an FAQ than it would be to figure it out yourself. The player's success at figuring out the systems on his own builds a new sense of confidence and control, one which is more honest than in the first half of the game where he is relentlessly guided. This matches the feeling of the Foundation in later books when they have bounced back from the Mule and their obsession with the Second Foundation.

Finally, I also wanted to put forward the idea of knowledge as a precious resource that can be traded and used to exert influence. This is something that has been used to some extent in the existing Civilization games, but not in quite the same way as it has in history. The Civ games believe in a straight-up transference of knowledge. What often happens instead is a kind of scientific and engineering colonialism, in which developed nations give the products of their ideas to the Third World without giving them the expertise itself. That's the fundamental underpinning of the Foundation's dominance in Asimov's books, and something for the player to think about in our world also.

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Downward Spiral

Corvus' January round table asks us to envision a game that preceded a favorite piece of literature. What game might have inspired The Iliad or Foundation? Well, I'm not going to deal in anything quite so epic. Instead I'm just going to imagine a game that might have inspired a poem I like by E.E. Cummings. This may not be what Corvus was going for, but it was an idea that came to mind and would not leave, so here you go.

I envision this as a browser-based flash game or a small downloadable. An impressionistic art style is what I would really prefer, given some of the early focus, but the later stages could also work with the heavily-lined visuals more common in these games.

The start-up screen for the game is an image of a tree standing alone in a lush field in summertime. Once the player has chosen to start the game by activating the window, the field of view zooms in on the top of the tree, finally focusing on a single yellow leaf, which immediately falls from its branch. From this point, all movements of the mouse result in gusts of wind. The player is free to move the mouse in any direction, but the maximum angle of the resulting "gust" will be 30° from horizontal. The ostensible aim of the game is to prevent the leaf from falling, but this is a losing battle for two reasons. Firstly, the leaf will not be able to exit the field of view, and the field of view will only travel downward in such a way that the leaf never enters the bottom fifth of the field. Secondly, the wind will not produce pure directional motion in the leaf, but rather chaotic tumbling.

The leaf begins descending through a green tree. The surrounding branches and leaves will move in response to the player's wind gusts. Starting about a fifth of the way down the green surrounding leaves will start transitioning to reds, purples, and dark browns. In order to assist the player's focus none of these leaves will be yellow. Once the color palette has transitioned completely the number of leaves on branches will begin to decrease (but none of them will fall off in the player's field of view). The player's aesthetic experience in this segment should be focused on the interplay of colors between leaves and sky, as well as light and shadow showing through them.

By about third of the way from the bottom the branches should be completely denuded (but still responsive to the wind gusts). The appearance of branches themselves should start decreasing in frequency until the field of view contains only the trunk and the leaf. The player's aesthetic experience in this region should be focused on the motions of the leaf itself. In keeping with this idea the chaotic tumbling of the leaf should be enhanced in some way.

As the leaf nears the ground the player sees that it is a white field of snow. Although this may have landscape features such as drifts, no living things should be in evidence: it is a fresh, deep snowfall. When the leaf lands on top of the snow the game ends. At this point the player's ability to perform any input ceases and more snow starts to fall, eventually burying the leaf.

During its descent the color of the leaf should fade from a bright yellow to a dull light brown. Its material behavior should also change. At the outset the leaf should be flat but flexible, changing its shape as it tumbles. During descent, however, it should gradually curl slightly at the edges and become a more rigid body. The color of the sky should fade from a light Carolina blue to a flat gray. Also during the descent the window should slowly zoom in on the leaf. At the outset the leaf should take up about 5% of the screen, growing to about 20% of the field of view at the end.

The E.E. Cummings poem I hope would be inspired by this game is "l(a":

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

I wanted the game to represent the explicit event while expressing the emotion. Obviously the verticality is important, but it's a natural part of the event (which is part of the brilliance of the poem). The simplicity of the game and spareness of the final stages are meant to connect with the linguistic efficiency of the poem. I suppose in one sense this isn't much of a game, because it's basically a way of playing with leaves, but I wanted it to display an unconventional attitude. The design relies heavily on gradients (of color, of shape, of element density), which doesn't really have much to do with the poem, but which I think would be critical to helping the emotion sneak up on the player.

I probably had more fun thinking that up than you had reading it, but fortunately everybody else has better entries. Go check them out!

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