The rest of my interview with Kieron Gillen, of Rock Paper Shotgun, has come on-line in two parts.

The “Making of Civ4” part is on RPS. Here’s an excerpt:

Soren: But I don’t think I thought as hard as I should have about the implications of making a strategy game in 3D where the worlds are going to be as big as they are in Civ. Because one of the first things a lot of people do when playing Civ is, “Well, I want to play a game. What’s the most number of Civs I can have? What’s the largest map I can have?” and beyond that “Okay… it’s 200 by 100. Is this in an XML file? Great. Now I’m going to have a map that’s 500 by 1000.” People want to play these giant maps in Civ, and it’s a real challenge to make that scaleable in 3D. To make a 3D game, you have to maintain a certain amount of data for everything that’s in the world somewhere, even if it’s not on the screen. You can make lots of optimisations, but you’re still keeping track of a lot of entities in the world, somewhere. It’s not as if there’s different levels – everything has to be around somewhere. Whereas in a 2D game, it can – in a sense – be as big as you want. You’re only showing X number of tiles on the screen, and you’re just swapping out the graphics for them. So when the game came out we had some major performance issues for that reason. And it’s tough. We needed some sort of streaming solution, but that’s very unusual for a strategy game where the player expects to be able to jump to any location on the map at any time in one frame. 3D is a big challenge, and it’s really important to think through what you’re trying to do with 3D and if it’s really possible to keep that much stuff in memory at a time.

A lot of people said they liked seeing the game in 3D – being able to zoom right in real close, to zoom out, to see the world spin around. It was a good thing for the project, but… sometimes I wonder what it would’ve be like if we had just stayed on the 2D train for 4. It’s weird. The gameplay could be the exact same. There’s no point where the graphics changed the way we would have written the game rules – it’s still a board game inside your computers. With 2D, we wouldn’t have had the same performance issues and we’d have been able to prototype the game perhaps even faster than we did – there’s a lot of stuff we were waiting for because we were developing this 3D strategy engine as we were going along. Further, 2D strategy games are in general more accessible than 3D ones because the abstraction is more obvious when you are looking at some sort of standardized 2D tile system. We had no end of trouble get people to see where the “tile” was in our 3D world for Civ4. So, 2D vs. 3D… It’s one of those things I’ll never know. I mean, I’m glad we went for 3D, just for no other reason than that we were stretching what we were doing with the Civilization series. We were tackling new territory. We weren’t just repeating ourselves. But everything has its trade-offs, and going 3D was no exception.

RPS: So what influenced your thinking with the team game?

Soren: Age of Kings really showed me how good a strategy game could be if they took the time to balance it well. They really thought long and hard how everything stuck together. You really had multiple ways to play the game, which usually manifested itself in you being a cavalry guy or a ranged guy or a melee guy or focusing on a specific unit. Which is just cool. Also, it’s really fun to play teamed multiplayer games.

Which really solved the problem for multiplayer in Civ. There had been some attempts to make Civ a multiplayer game before Civ 4, and I don’t think anyone would look at them as being big successes. Usually that’s because we weren’t thinking very hard about the actual dynamic inside a multiplayer game of Civ. We were looking a a direct mapping of the game. If you play a game of Civ in singleplayer, it’s almost a story . You’re a king, and there’s all these other AI civs. And we write the game rules so it’s fun for you to play. The most important thing is how they relate to you. And if you get screwed, and you have a bad starting location, you’re still in charge – you just have to restart the game, or quit and roll a new map, or whatever. That’s what makes the game work. The player is in control.

RPS: Which clearly isn’t true if there’s other people to think of, yeah?

Soren: If you’re in 8 player multiplayer in Civ, it’s going to be a mess. Obviously, there’s the turn-based issue of waiting for people to play, but most importantly the games are going to take a long time, and it’s going to be fairly clear who are the people who can win and the people who are going to be also-rans. There’s just no motivation to keep on playing at that point. So if you play a game of Civ in MP, one player starts doing really well and takes a lot of time with their turns, and the other guy who’s doing poorly and obviously is going to lose, he’s always waiting for the other guy. It’s just not a really fun gameplay experience in multiplayer. When we started testing Civ 4 in MP – which is something we did right at the beginning of the project and not worrying about singleplayer until much later – it was fun and nice that we finally had the tech to make it work, and it was still kind of engaging to play Civ with a real person across the border… but there was something which always made it spiral out of control.

Finally, we learned lessons from games like Age of Kings and Starcraft and all these other RTS. It’s just standard that team-play is a big focus. We started adopting that. We’ve got six people playing and have two sides of three and see what happened… though it took a while for us to figure out what were the right rule-sets to use. Like, they probably should share technologies, and it’ll be silly for them to trade back and forth. And if they’re both researching the same tech, maybe it’ll go twice as fast. And then someone suggested that maybe they should share the effects of wonders… well, let’s try it out and see what happens. Sounds overpowered, but on the other hand we don’t want rivalries inside the teams. “He got the Pyramids! Damn, I wanted that effect.”

RPS: The complete opposite of Defcon. An ally is just who you stab last.

Soren: Which fits the shorter game. Nuclear war, after all. But we thought it was really important in Civ. Obviously, you don’t have to play in teams. You can have unofficial alliances if you want. But we felt it was important in the team game to be permanent – you knew who you were with at the beginning and it wasn’t going to change. Which totally changed the dynamic – it was so much fun. Firstly, people could specialise. I’ll focus on wonders, because I like building, and you can focus on military. People were helping each other out; co-op is a lot of fun. If the tide starts to turn and it’s clear that one side is going to win, well, you just start over. You don’t have to worry about some people wanting to start over and others not. There’s only two teams after all. And actually a lot of the MP I hear about in Civ 4, is like a dad and son playing against the AI at a higher difficulty level. And that’s totally legitimate too. We definitely picked up those lessons from playing a lot of RTS. At Firaxis we were hard, hardcore players of Age of Kings. We figured out every nuance of that game.

The print portion with PC Gamer UK has shown up on CVG. Here are some more quotes:

Why make games at all?

Johnson: It’s a field where you’re writing the rules right now. Some day 100 years from now, they’re going to writing about the stuff we do now, because this is the crucial moment for games. Beyond that… well, 100 years ago, if I’d been born, I think I might be making board games. It’s not just games for me – I come from a real board game, strategy game backdrop.

This is what I’m about. I feel that games are such a broad category. You can do so much with games. People put it up and compare it to… well, are games like music or movies or books? I see games not like a new medium, but a new way of communicating – a new language, so much broader than a specific artistic medium.

It’s so fascinating to work on. Your imagination keeps on rolling when you’re dealing with games. In all the other media, you feel as if you’re eventually going to some kind of limitation, but with games there’s no idea that’s so far off the wall that you don’t think “Hmm, I guess we could make that work some way or another.”

Games kind of hark back to the days before the schism of art and science, in that technological progress can also be artistic progress…

Johnson: I know if I was around 200 years ago… How cool it’d be to have these great scientists who are really into music and whatever, and you could actually have most of modern knowledge in your brain at one time. 200 years ago, that was theoretically possible and is a neat idea.

I find a lot of game designers just have a ravenous appetite for stuff. Will Wright is the classic example. There’s nothing which doesn’t interest him in some way.

And this is another thing I really like about writing about games, especially games which aren’t about some made up fantasy world… when I was working on Civ, there’s literally nothing I can do or experience or learn which doesn’t relate somehow to my job.

You majored in History. That ties in with Civilization too.

Johnson: It’s just very interesting to me. Here’s history… and here’s this new language of interactivity. Can this be combined in an interesting way? Is this the way to jump ahead or to the side of this giant long tradition of history and prose? I found that very interesting. I used to find it a lot more interesting than I do now.

The more you get into designing games, the more you find the medium and language has huge possibilities, but also has specific limitations. The entire idea of player agency means certain topics aren’t going to be appropriate.

For instance, in world history, one of the most important books of the last 10 or 15 years is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel… He’s saying that all history is determined by geography. I read that before working on Civ III, and was all pumped up – there’s all these great concepts which you could put to work in a macro world-history game.

The thing is, if you make a Civ game based off the ideas in Guns, Germs and Steel, it’d suck. The whole point is that there aren’t choices that determine whether a civilisation does well or poorly – it’s whether you have the right crops. Do you have the right animals? Are you in the right place? In early versions of Civ IV, we tried.

Horses will always be on one continent and not another. We’ll show people how this stuff works. But it didn’t work in terms of gameplay. It felt unfair.

By strange coincidence, I’ve been e-mailed twice over the last week by different people asking for a peek at the source code for some of my older academic projects (Oxford Mercer and Advanced Protection). I have some further info concerning these works on my old-school Stanford home page, but the source has always resided somewhere deep within my archives. After doing some digging, I zipped up both projects (as well as GridRunner) and added links to the code under the My Games section. Enjoy!

This is not a review of Ticket to Ride, which is – needless to say – a wonderful game, both for experienced gamers and for those weened on Monopoly and Life. If you’ve never played it, stop reading right now and go here to play for free. (Their publisher, Days of Wonder, has an interesting business model as well – their online games are free-to-play but pay-to-host.)

No, what I would like to talk about is the story of Ticket to Ride. Since you have played the game (seriously, just go do it), reflect for a moment on what the game is about. During the game, you lay tracks to connect distant cities while trying to block your opponents from finishing their own routes. There are sub goals too, like having the longest contiguous rail line and completing your network first, which ends the game for everyone. It’s essentially a simplified version of Railroad Tycoon, right? Right?

Let me quote from first page of the game rules:

On a blustery autumn evening five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance – from all corners of the world – to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 – 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg, accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days.

Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition. The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America – in just 7 days.

Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure. Players compete to connect different cities by laying claim to railway routes on a map of North America.

What?!? This storyline makes the game sound almost like a spiritual successor to Around the World in 80 Days instead of what it actually is – another link in the great chain of railroad tycoon games. The fiction simply does not match the gameplay. For example, why does a player “claim” a route just by riding on it? Do the trains shut down, preventing anyone else from using that line? On the other hand, “claiming” routes matches perfectly with the fiction of ruthless rail barons trying to monopolize the best connections.

This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game’s designer have the right to tell us what the “story” is if it doesn’t match what’s going on inside our own heads while we are playing the game? And if the designer doesn’t have this right, then does a game’s official “story” ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? However, setting the game in the world of trains was clearly very important – if Ticket to Ride was a game about bus lines, I doubt it would have nearly the same resonance. Once again, setting trumps story in importance…

Part of a recent interview I did with Kieron Gillen just went up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ll post links when the rest of the interview emerges. Here are some quotes:

RPS: Ballooning team size is a trend which has been well discussed over the last decade, but do you think that’s reversing slightly on the PC now? As long as you set your sights intelligently…

Soren: I’m in an odd position, going from Civ 4 which was a big project, to Spore which is a mammoth project… but it’s just that I think most of the stuff which is going to benefit from smaller teams is going to be stuff comes across the web. We see that all the time now. It’s finally a viable market. Think of Defcon. That game didn’t have art. Which is brilliant.

RPS: Very artfully chosen unart, if you know what I mean.

Soren: It’s a weird feeling – I play the game, and it looks great, because they chose a brilliant style. It doesn’t need art. It just fits their game perfectly. But the interesting thing to me about Defcon is that the size of the game is right. It’s a pretty good game – it’s not quite a brilliant game, but it’s a fun game to play. But you can’t say that it’s too simple or too complex. It reminded me of a lot of RTS’s when I first discovered them a decade ago. Now it’s really difficult with an RTS to…

RPS: Not submit to the endless feature bloat. You have to have all the bullet-points.

Soren: Yeah, you can’t make it without a campaign and scenarios and an editor and cutscenes and all that extra junk. Really, that junk is preventing us from making more interesting games. It’s kind of a paradox. Obviously, people want that junk, and it’s a good thing for those people. And the editors with which people make their own scenarios is great… but that stuff all comes at a cost. I think maybe we’re starting to realise that now. The answer is that the economics get turned entirely around when you don’t have to deal with Best Buy and Wal-Mart and what not.

RPS: People endlessly talk about the declining PC, but the figures never include those specific areas where the PC is expanding – the online sales, MMOs. When we started RPS, for me it was about trying to redefine what a PC Game is to include all that. I’m sure Peggle will be in everyone’s top 10 games this year… but can you imagine a game like Peggle being included in mainstream PC talk a few years ago?

Soren: Or Desktop: Tower Defense. That’s an awesome game too. I play that more than most strategy games I’ve played this year. Which is weird but… what does that mean? So yeah, absolutely. The PC Market is no one thing any more. There’s no sales figures you can look at. The question is simply is “What is the variety coming through? What are the different options available we didn’t have three or four years ago”. For me, PC Gaming should be like Punk Rock – being able to do whatever you want. And people are forgetting that the Punk period isn’t just the Ramones and the Sex Pistols… it’s Talking Heads, Televisions, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four… this huge variety of stuff because people were making it up as they were going along. It was easy enough to make music that people did what they wanted to. And that’ll always be the advantage of PCs.

RPS: I interviewed Doug Church about what it was like developing when the PC had started being a real gaming platform, circa 92 or whatever. And, basically, when doing Shock they just didn’t know what they were doing. They were original by default. In the following 15 years, like the feature bloat, by learning what works, it also limits you a bit. The people in the mainstream need to work out what ELSE works. But the European teams try stuff which no-one else does, because they don’t know any better. Like the Bohemia Armed-Assault guys, trying forever working on their butterflies…

Soren: That’s games. And it’s funny how much pleasure people can get from little things in games which you’ve never seen before. I know what you mean – think about RTS. What does that term mean? Now it means a very specific thing… but what else is Real time strategy? The first Sim City was real time strategy. Populous was an RTS. Rollercoaster Tycoon is RTS. You could say M.U.L.E. was RTS. Obviously Defcon and Darwinia are. RTS should be the biggest category there is, but right now it’s very, very specific. There are a few triple A titles which are trying to push it – World in Conflict was an interesting take on that. But you need people to come along who aren’t intimidated by all the stuff that exists already in the genre.

Here’s another crazy Asian cube game that you must play. Be sure not to give up as the designers don’t prepare you for the fact that you are using your current “lives” to help your later “lives” succeed.

Valve recently released some very interesting stats, including Death Maps, from HL2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. What are Death Maps? Well, here’s one from the Gravel Pit map for TF2:

I can attest to dying (and killing) quite a few times near the C node in the lower-left corner. Looks like I’m not the only one.

As a designer, I find the TF2 stats fascinating – I would have loved to see similar info on how people played Civ4. Obviously, some of the results are unsurprising. Scouts get the most captures by a ratio of 2:1 over the next best class, the Pyro. Snipers get the most kills. Medics get the most assists. The points category has a little more balance as it includes a number of factors, but there is still a big spread between the Sniper’s 67 points/hour to the Engineer’s 41. The big question, of course, is what Valve should do with this info when balancing the game.

The idea of game balance is a tricky one because many people assume that, in a well-balanced game, all options should be equally valid. Rock, Paper, Scissor is the classic example of an “equally balanced” game, and bringing it up allows me to reference Sirlin’s excellent article on why RPS is a terrible game:

A simple rock, paper, scissors (RPS) system of direct counters is a perfectly solid and legitimate basis for a strategy game provided that the rock, paper, and scissors offer unequal risk/rewards.

Consider a strictly equal game of RPS. We’ll play 10 rounds of the game, with a $1 bet on each round. Which move should you choose? It makes absolutely no difference whether you choose rock, paper, or scissors. You’ll be playing a pure guess. Since your move will be a pure guess, I can’t incorporate your expected move into my strategy, partly because I have no basis to expect you to play one move or another, and partly because I really can’t have any strategy to begin with.

Now consider the same game of RPS with unequal payoffs. If you win with rock, you win $10. If you win with scissors, you win $3. If you win with paper, you win $1. Which move do you play? You clearly want to play rock, since it has the highest payoff. I know you want to play rock. You know I know you know, and so on. Playing rock is such an obvious thing to do, you must realize I’ll counter it ever time. But I can’t counter it (with paper) EVERY time, since then you could play scissors at will for a free $3. In fact, playing scissors is pretty darn sneaky. It counters paper—the weakest move. Why would you expect me to do the weakest move? Are you expecting me to play paper just to counter your powerful rock? Why wouldn’t I just play rock myself and risk the tie? You’re expecting me to be sneaky by playing paper, and you’re being doubly sneaky by countering with scissors. What you don’t realize is that I was triply sneaky and I played the original obvious move of rock to beat you.

In other words, there is no such thing as an “equally balanced” game which is still fun and not just random. Instead, fun games tend to have a “free market” of balance, which ebbs and flows based on the desirability of certain decisions. Scouts and engineers are always going to be important because they are, respectively, the purest offensive and defensive classes. Indeed, these two classes are also the two most popular. However, the Spy can use the sapper to destroy an Engineer’s turret pretty easily, and Pyros are good at lighting Scouts on fire. The Heavy gets the most kills but – as a slow mover – is vulnerable to the Sniper, who is in turn is vulnerable to the Demoman’s grenades. And so on.

The key is that the circle is not complete. Many of the counter units – the Demo, the Pyro, the Spy – do not have counters themselves because there is less incentive to play them in a vacuum. In Sirlin’s words, the classes offer “unequal risk/rewards.” If you play an Engineer, and no one on the other side is playing a Spy, your team is going to have great defense. On the other hand, as more and more people pick Engineers, the more attractive the Spy will become. Nonetheless, the most important goal is to have good defense, not to just be able to screw with the Engineers.

So, we are back at the question of what Valve should do with the stats. By definition, the counter units should never be more popular than the classes they are countering. Thus, it’s ok that the Engineer is twice as popular as the Spy. On the other hand, Valve should certainly learn something from these stats… but exactly what is a bit of a mystery.

So this happened over the weekend. As both Activision and Blizzard/Sierra have been corporate conglomerates for a long time, this move is unlikely to change much for the developers under the new umbrella company. However, one interesting side note here is that the Guitar Hero franchise is now owned by the world’s largest music publisher. I guess we won’t be seeing any U2, Prince, Guns N’ Roses, or (yeah, probably just dreaming here…) Velvet Underground masters on Rock Band anytime soon.