When worlds collide

April 12th, 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti

While growing up I was something of a god. I don’t mean this in the sense that I was worshiped by my peers, or excelled at sport or anything like that. And as far as I know, I never possessed a heavenly mandate or supernatural powers (despite countless attempts over the years, I have never been able to move objects using only will power and the Force).

Alas, my divinity was limited to the much more down to earth, arguably even geeky, reality of old fashioned pen and paper role-play games. As anyone who has been involved in role-play games knows, the playing of the game itself is only part of the fun. For those of you who missed out on this highly entertaining and addictive experience, here is a brief rundown of the other aspect – the creationism (forgive me Darwin) required before a game starts.

Let there be light
First, you boldly create new worlds, shape the universe in which they exist and populate them with fictional people and places. Next – after breaking for coffee – you write the history, the background, imaginary wars and political struggles of your new worlds. You define, with great detail, the evolutionary process (this is now sounding like intelligent design theory) that shaped each creature and character, and provide them with motivation, goals, obstacles or simple excuses. Finally, you order your creation with rules. These provide your universe with internal coherence and logic. Note that because all of what you have created must obey them, these laws are more like gravity than the Ten Commandments.

As God and any other role players out there know, it’s a long process (perhaps not quite the five days quoted in The Book of Genesis) and also an extremely rewarding one.

Creating these complex and believable ecosystems not only takes a long time, it needs a great deal of imagination and a passion for the minutiae. This applies whether it’s a pen a paper world or a digital one. Just ask the team behind the Mass Effect trilogy (Bioware) how long it took them to work out how Quarians reproduce through their antibiotics-stuffed suit, or why for Elcors a simple smile looks more like a volcanic eruption (be warned – there is no short answer).

Using technology to spread the good news
In the digital age, of course, there is infinitely greater opportunity to share your worlds with other people – and get paid for them. While traditional game players like myself (I’m making myself sound very old here) take great pleasure in the process of creating our own worlds, I also love exploring those created by others. And as mobile technology evolves, these worlds are becoming increasingly accessible.

For years now developers have been trying to create systems which allow users to play games when physically removed from the main terminal (usually a PC or a console). Results so far have been mixed. I could for example name spin offs of popular series, created especially for mobiles, that were unable to sync with the main chapters. Another disappointment was VMU portable memory cards for Sega Dreamcast. This allowed gamers to continue to play very limited parts of a wider game on the handheld VMU while away from the main console, and then sync your efforts with the wider game when you return to the main console. Conceptually the VMU card was not far from the digital pet fad Tamagotchi (a similar version of this has now been resuscitated with the new iteration of Pokemon for Nintendo DS).

With new advances, such as the recently announced Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft might have found a way to integrate living room (or desktop) games with portable devices. However, even taking for granted the absence of technical barriers, the problem of integrating two very different kind of interaction (desktop and mobile interfaces) in a coherent gameplay experience remains unsolved.

AdamDust and Eve
This evolution in mobile gaming is occurring at a time when exciting advances are being made in the varying the scale of gameplay. For those of you still reading who are not gamers, you may not have heard of the much celebrated – at least in gaming circles – EVE Online. Developed by CCP of Iceland, Eve Online is a MMOG (massively multi-player online game), with one of the most sophisticated and detailed sci-fi worlds (outside of those already established universes, such Star Wars or Star Trek, imported from galaxies far far away like Hollywood).

Although an incredible universe, its appeal was limited to all but the most enthusiastic science fiction fans due to its level of detail: EVE Online is also jokingly known as “Excel in Space” for the depth of its economic and political system. To overcome this, CCP has been secretly working on a spin off called Dust 514.

Revealed with a stunning launch trailer in December 2009, Dust 514 is an FPS (first person shooter) game based on the same setting of EVE Online. What makes it innovative is that not only do the two games share the same world, but they are also connected. In short, what happens in EVE is reflected on Dust 514 and vice versa. This opens up amazing gameplay possibilities, with users able to control high-level inter-planetary space warfare but also scale down to the micro-level of an individual guerrilla soldier on a strategically important planet.

To control this varied action CCP developed the role of commander in chief: “He’s above the action,” explains the creative director Atli Már Sveinsson, “but he still has the ability to go into a voyeur mode and zoom down to see his installations in full 3D. It may sound removed, but as commander you can influence the battlefield by creating incentives for your players to perform certain tasks: you’re working towards objectives and moving the focus of the fighting about.” (EDGE 209)

In games of the future, where the scale will expand or zoom-in depending on the situation, it’s not hard to imagine enormous, highly detailed universes becoming hubs of many different gameplay experiences rather than just one. Some of these experiences will be better suited for the sofa (for example deciding overall strategies on a battlefield), others for the ten minutes spent on a train to reach the city center (for example contributing on a micro level to an aspect of the wider game, such as building barracks).

The point is that all of the users’ experiences will be connected and meaningful. For this to work, the system will need to be able to scale tasks and aspects of gameplay according to the terminal accessing the game. In such a scenario, the micro gaming could be effectively crowdsourced to a massive pool of mobile gamers, potentially creating an enormous, incredibly sophisticated global game.

While getting to this point may require some help from the Force, it is clear that the gaming experience – especially for those at the higher, god-like strategic level – would be unparalleled. Indeed, for those who do not believe in a higher being, it may offer the nearest thing to a truly religious experience.

---

Share

 Print article

---