《A Kind of Magic》
Setting of the universe
Virtual reality games sweeped the video games market as soon as the "real feelings" ceased to be a marketing lie and even before the technology conveying them thinned down to an affordable, plug-and-play headgear. The story of how it went down, though, is quite interesting and a story on its own.
It all started with Royal Road, of course. Huge and incredibly expensive booth, on top of a high monthly subscription, everything hinted at a gamble to appeal to rich elites (or rather, their kids) in an effort to profit from a technology still in its infancy. Before the launch, critics furbished their pens, readied their most caustic quips and angrily called to arms their colleagues to tear down this over ambitious project.
It was widely expected that the game, past the fleeting impression of reality given by the stimulating booths and the oh-so-pretty rendered universe, would feel just as clich¨¦ and hollow as other hastily-readied simple-screened games. "Sure, it''s nice, but killing 10 rats then 12 rabbits then 15 wolves will feel just as boring if not more in a realistic universe that it is on other games." was read all over the Internet.
Of course, as the reader himself knows, the launch of the games silenced all critics - and by all, the author assuredly mean the ones innocuous enough to praise genius when it meets their eyes, so not that great a number. Because wrapped in the visual and feelable technological breakthrough was another one even more mind-boggling, a game engine unlike any other, generating quests and events players could relate to, and loads of intriguing, credible NPCs. Without glossing over already accepted facts, Royal Road was as believable a world as our own. Psychologists and sociologists made well-argued points about minor discrepancies, though not only did a few years of patching reduce most of these, but this also felt as credible as a prestidigitator calling his colleague a fraud for being unable to avert his experienced eye from the tricks. For the rest of the world, it was magic, as it should.
Now, while the game might have been magic, the market painted a different story. Tightly locked in brevets, the technology was owned by Unicorn Gaming, the publisher of Royal Road, and by them only - they made sure to use every loophole, legal or not, to make sure of it. That''s why, dear reader, you can still see the discreet unicorn logo on your very own game headgear. The brain - the game engine, though, was another thing. Within years enthusiasts all around the worlds had recreated a game engine with similar, if not better, complexity, that has been continuously updated ever since. What¡¯s more, in an attempt to offset Unicorn Gaming monopoly they dared to make it publicly available, with parameters available for all to adjust.
At first, it didn''t garner as much interest as it should : ¡°sure, you could simulate another Royal Road - and maybe it was really easy if the computer guys said so, but it meant knowing all the stuff needed to surround the IA with so it can create other stuff while I''m barely able to make my computer launch¡±. It only took off when an otherwise undistinguished "computer guy", ro0ky101, put together a kit which enabled anyone to create his own Royal Road. Or something in a science-fiction setting. Or a royal court, a prison, anything really. At the cost of a few clicks and $5/month hosting space, anyone could create the MMO they always wished to play, and the IA would take over to ensure its content would be interesting, and the tales it contained full of heart wrenching stories and epic events - or if you wanted a place to have a cup of tea discussing with philosophers, you could have that too. Of course, the VRMMORPG genre exploded, just like the Internet exploded in its time.
The results were interesting, to say the least. Two main problems emerged : first, people weren''t that imaginative. Leaving aside the consequences on the adult market that have been studied elsewhere and aren''t the subject of this article, that is. What people mostly wanted out of a video game, it seemed, was that it be theirs, named after themselves, set in a strange but seemingly interesting setting (ninja, space, pirates, you name it), to be asked simple and menial things by friendly NPCs and be showered in recompenses and other feel-goods thingies when completing them. Of course, there are numerous exceptions to the rules, and we can think of the "abodies" niche, specializing in trying to move around a non antropomorphic body, or its more extreme variant "aphysics", but for the most part the understanding was that the kind of worlds people wanted to play in, while subtle in themselves and extremely thorough in their possibilities, weren''t that different from each other after a little texture change.
The other problem was quite simple, really : empty worlds. The very essence of the MMO was left out when anyone could create the MMO of its dreams with minimal effort and perfect rendition. Play that other game that your friend designed just didn¡¯t have the same appeal. Still, people didn''t want empty worlds, as amazing as the IA was. They still needed to talk about what their thief-ninja could do, to have a community that could marvel at the same things as them, have common goals or past aspirations, maybe people to look up and down to. The coder community handling the game engine mulled over the two problems and finally decided upon a solution that tied the two closely. Or rather, they came up with 26 solutions with each having defenders and proponents, each implemented in 3 or 4 different ways, but we''ll only cover the one idea and the one implementation that were later accepted as standard.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
The gist of it is quite simple : since people want the same things with different flavors, why not just put similarly flavored universes together, with every piece of data received by the user translated in a fitting manner ? You could get a quest from an old lady, retrieve her set of false teeths in the nearby park with another gentleman, all the while ignoring that this very same gentleman was slaying countless foes with your help, retrieving the Sacred Artifact of Eternal Hunger for a priestess of the Geriatric Cult. Ultimately ; it was the same, as long as none of you could tell the difference, and the game engine made sure of that.
Actually, as with almost every other simple-sounding idea, the technological prowesses needed to implement it generated a seemingly never-ending stream of papers, PhD and studies, but the writer wouldn''t dare to pretend understanding any of it and let this stuff to the expert. But let''s talk about the results : it was spectacular, and it felt right. You could enjoy the game of your dreams the way you wanted.
As always, another "problem" soon emerged : easy games. Some people wanted a world were just breathing was enough to be granted heavenly powers, and used it to "disrupt" other players. Automatic bans were added to prevent these players from interacting with others, but they were quicky circumvented and weren''t a solution in themselves. For the most part, these users weren¡¯t mischievous, they were simply playing around in their perfect world, which happened to allow to do things that would require years in most other games. The problem was conceptual : ultimately, some players wanted everything to be simple, and it was quite right, and others wanted to evolve in a world they deemed fair, and it was right as well. In response, coders introduced the most controversial aspect of nowadays VVMORPGs, the "fair" mechanic. Among certains HUBs of games deemed as "competitive" (which soon became de facto standards), the game engine would scale the maximum achievable power to the difficulty of the settings. From now on, if you wanted godly powers from the beginnings, the maximum achievable power would translate to roughly the one of these bully NPCs you meet in early quests in a standard universe.
Now, let''s be clear : entire worlds, or rather entire paths, -died- because of the fair mechanism. Constantly living among powers of greatly differing powers, accepting difficulties or setbacks in your own personal quests as something you wished to have and not wrought upon you, slowly deciding upon your morals from these choices, and the sheer magnitude and diversity of the worlds and players you could encounter before the introduction of this mechanism far exceeded the meager satisfaction you get from knowing your neighbor is more well-off than you because he put more effort in the game. But the writer wouldn''t want to let his personal opinion cloud this otherwise hopefully informative article and won''t ramble more on this.
The consequences are easy for the reader to see, as nothing has really changed ever since. Most people play with settings allowing complicated moves with a thought, top ranking players are athletes or otherwise gifted with peculiar abilities (and a lot of playtime) playing in higher difficulties settings, and a minority play in non-competitive HUBs. Now, let¡¯s not forget any popular genre always has its load of ¡°free thinkers¡± or ¡°hipsters¡± or however this epoch will name them, people aiming to find their own enjoyment through a carefully chosen marginalization. These players would mostly aim for a competitive HUBs but with settings tuned to some sort of extreme, allowing their views on the (gaming) world to stand - or not - grueling tests while still maintaining peer approval.
As luck would have it, the writer will now focus on one of these players.
Any remark or criticism is of course welcome.
Perfunctory presentation of the protagonist and other settings
Madison decided it was time for a new game. His current settings, sci-fi world heavily-oriented towards grinding and scarce quests, may be somewhat satisfying and close to what his friends played for extra closeness, but given their current rankings, it would take him forever to come close to most of them, and he didn¡¯t particularly enjoy the thought. After all, he could only pretend not to care about rankings for so long, as his universe wasn¡¯t original enough on its own to justify his lack of performance with interest in others areas. And he couldn¡¯t say to his friends ¡°No, I¡¯m not interested in trying to catch-up with someone playing twice as much as me in an environment where all interactions are completed by thoughts.¡± Actually, he could say it, he just didn¡¯t have that many friends already and wasn¡¯t willing to take the chance.
¡°Blast it, I¡¯ll forget about the rankings and just try something else.¡± Having said that, low-spirited Madison figured he¡¯d just have to find an appalling way to play that would interest him enough to forget about all competing. Like his friend Ashley, who¡¯d play with graphical settings a lot just to enjoy the views, either psychedelic or artsy. Or Marlowe, always playing in sport universes, all about gliding, surfing, riding and things. ¡°...¡± Unfortunately, he felt both of them had deep-rooted passions for their respective choices and a - should he think it ? - a somewhat circular personnality that allowed them to self-sustain in their own bubbly universe. And it¡¯s not like Marlowe had bad rankings. ¡°Let¡¯s face it, I can¡¯t forget about the rankings.¡±
Turning the analysis on his own personality, Madison felt a need to reach out to others, even if only through scores, and he wasn¡¯t one of these high-spirited individuals who can be fired up about the strangest things. Instead, his passions all died within weeks of their awakening : hell, if he didn¡¯t constantly switched games, he wouldn¡¯t be behind his friends all the time ! Or so he thought. Yet his way to solve the problem was another game change, the irony wasn¡¯t lost on him. ¡°I can¡¯t compete in numbers of hours with my studies anyway, so my only option is to set up a high difficulty universe. But without any real life skill, I first need to assess my options.¡± Sighing, he turned to the Internet to search information on the high-difficulty settings.
The difficulty setting, as he read, was deeply rooted in its programing origin, meaning the highest difficulty wasn¡¯t some carefully tested mode with only a slight chance to progress for experienced and talented individuals, it was the setting above which normal people would die without having time to disconnect - It wasn¡¯t used besides for suicides, and from what he could guess, that was a painful way to go. The few individuals playing in extreme but livable settings would have nausea just walking, be openly discriminated in every town, while only allowed to one life - which didn¡¯t matter much, since typically the evil masterminds of the worlds would ally themselves and take over the game within 2 weeks of the start of the server.
So what you had to do when starting a difficult game, was to carefully adjust the settings. For beginners, it was strongly advised to put the ¡°pain¡± setting to ¡°wound-only¡±, meaning you wouldn¡¯t feel anything except in fights situations. Otherwise, pain could be linked to success of actions, forcing you to withstand inconfort proportional to the difficulty of what you tried, for example, or even feeling needle piercing you when talking with someone. As mentioned above, the settings were raw, they had a barbaric feeling to them : the game engine would do something clever about what you gave him in low or normal difficulties settings, but you couldn¡¯t ask for high-difficulty and pain without encountering absurd tortures situations.
Another recurring advice was to adjust the familiarity of the world to players to manageable levels. At the most extreme setting, every being generated by the game engine would -know- about being an auto-generated IA designed to please users and be very, very angry about it. One second in, you¡¯d be swarmed by billions of Skynet-like creatures all aiming at your throat. Even a less extreme setting would mean being treated as an alien - imagine being a powerless Superman and everyone is Lex Luthor. On the other hand, being identified as a regular citizen was bad too, since a compression time of 5:1 was standard across all competitive HUBs, and you wouldn¡¯t realize anything when playing only one day out of 30 - and that was with 4 hours of gaming a day ! So something like ¡°distant but pleasant foreigner¡± was probably good if you wanted to interact successfully with the game.
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The list went on and on, no clever antagonists unless you were a genius, no overly sophisticated communication means as it would result in constant betrayals and cabals, not too high physical prowess as battles would be impossible without special training¡ In fact, high settings were used as training for athletes so it could be interesting if you wanted to train like them. The more he read, the more Madison felt low-spirited. He resumed his take on this with ¡°If you want to play in high-difficulty, just don¡¯t¡±. Fortunately, he finally found someone explaining that the key to high-difficulty was to max out areas you didn¡¯t intend to play in. If you wanted to play in a trading role, make sure NPCs are as strong as bandits and max out difficulties of fights you¡¯ll never partake in, hiring some escorts when moving, or if you are to be Conan, make sure to max out NPCs level of language, so that feeling like an uncivilized brute wouldn¡¯t matter if you are, indeed, an uncivilized brute.
The Game Engine would of course detect your behaviour in some way and adjust the difficulty settings if you tried to cheat him, but as long as you made sure the part you spent most of the time on were still difficult and that you were good enough for them, if was the perfect way to earn solid rankings. Finally recovering his spirits, Madison read story after story of successful people who not only had good rankings and were enjoying themselves, but were also becoming quite good in the areas they specialized in. ¡°I should have started that years ago !¡± - an exclamation that would have had more strength if not frequently uttered by the kind of gamer Madison was, always jumping from an idea to another. Nevertheless, he was currently oblivious to that and quite happy about himself.
It was time to launch the game creation kit, and Madison happily set a fixed difficulty among the higher but manageable ones, allowing the Game engine to adjust factors he didn¡¯t change so the global difficulty remained constant. He chose a fantasy universe, as he preferred those, and not feeling like a fighter outright set fighting techniques at maximum difficulty. He didn¡¯t see the point in letting pain dictate what he can do, so he followed the advice and put it at 0, and did it too for the NPCs knowledge of players, put normal settings for illnesses, extremes of luck and others possibly dangerous events that allowed no counterparts. As a personal preference, he ensured quests were plentiful, scarce quests would hinder his growth. In others areas, he allowed some part of randomness in the setting which, combined with the auto-adjustments, made sure he still could be surprised about what the game entailed.
From that point on, he pondered what he was good at, so he could have something to rely on. ¡°I think I¡¯m all-around good at video games. Not in actual rankings, but I tested so many things that I know my way around them, where to ask, who to please and mechanics I ought to rely on. In some way, a theorycrafter.¡± - it was a blatant lie. Accordingly, he put NPCs exigences to a high level, and a somewhat high mechanical value on every area, trading, magic, logistics, craft, etc¡ Even if he didn¡¯t feel that confident, he figured he could still learn bit after bit. And as he told himself, trying new things always is a good thing in itself. Last thing to do was to put a name to his game, in case someone else wanted to try it. He didn¡¯t care much as he figured only his friends would bother to look at it, so he put ¡°Madis0n¡¯s mad Skillz¡±, which was as good a name as any.
Seconds later.
[td4]
Connect to Madis0n¡¯s mad Skillz ?
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| Yes | No |
Any remark or criticism is of course welcome.