The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming

Bastard beta testing!

By Brad Wardell

"BLECH! THAT SUCKED!" That is the typical reaction when someone first plays their favorite game for the first time on-line.

Why? Because every game with multiplayer is actually two games. What a deal! The first game is the one you paid for. The second game is the on-line game in which you play the game totally for maximizing winning, which often means playing the game totally differently than one would intuitively or logically expect.

For instance, imagine a baseball game in which, by chance, if the pitcher hits the batter with the ball, the batter has a 50% chance of being disabled for the rest of the game. In single player against the computer, you would play the game in the spirit of baseball. But on-line you would quickly discover that every time one of your decent hitters goes to bat, he would get nailed in the head by your opponent's pitcher thus putting him out of the game. What the heck? Welcome to the world of on-line gaming.

I suspect that that there's a lot of crying going on when some game designer discovers how people actually play the game (and win) on-line. That RTS game with 50 different units and great combined arms turns into a simple tank rush game because it turns out that if you have 50 of a particular unit you're unstoppable. Some minute game design flaw totally changes the way it's done.

I remember when I was in the PGL playing Total Annihilation. There was a map called Coast to Coast, consisting of two pieces of land separated by water. The game designers thought this was a naval map; build ships, dominate the seas, and then do a land invasion. But in PGL, we didn't build ships. We built missile defenders against ships on our land and walked our commander over early on to wreak havoc on the enemy base, far away from their commander. And then we walked back knowing that we'd put them behind far enough that by the time they were starting to do well, our Big Bertha would be complete and we'd lay waste to their base and end the game. The poor defeated player was totally angry that we never even built a ship the entire game but still won.

Cont'd