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I'm amusing myself in spare hours with a design contest. Although Puzzle Pirates is an online diversion built around Tetris-like games, it has much in common with MMORPGs: players have an avatar that travels, fights computer-generated bots and other players, collects booty, and exchanges it for better equipment and badges of status. One group of players has accumulated sufficient stuff to establish themselves on an island. Apparently lacking any civic planners, they put out a call for city designs and offered a small prize for the best. Even though I've never played Puzzle Pirates and have no grasp of what to look for in an island, I love laying out fictional maps if efficient roads and similar optimization is involved, so what the hell? If my design wins, Eileene gets some fictional money.

The real problem isn't my ignorance of play. The real problem is the instructions [spelling errors are not mine]:

Your city will be decided on the how aesthtically pleasing and efficient it is to the judges. Remember, you are building a real city. If there is a shop that lacks a corresponding bazaar your island will be DQed. If there is a large imbalance of shop ratios (12 IM's 8 Weaveries and 2 Apoths) it will negatively affect your score. If there is widespread paving of natural resources it will also affect your score. Having a naming theme for all of your shops may help or harm your plan. It all depends on how your names tickle the judges. Messy work will affect a score negatively.

There are more scoring criteria which I will not completely spell out for the sake of brevity. Just think that your are really colonizing Delta and make your island look as seamless as posible.

That's it. Not a word on what exactly should be efficient. Efficient travel time across the island? For visitors or residents? Efficient shopping trips or foraging? Efficiency in spotting important buildings? Efficient (i.e., dense) use of terrain for maximum building? How important are aesthetics versus efficiency? How much will a large imbalance of shop ratios affect one's score? What about paving? If you can get a 20% efficiency (in something) increase at the expense of paving 5% of the natural resources, is that good?

The statement "There are more scoring criteria which I will not completely spell out..." makes me grit my teeth. It's the bane of consultants everywhere. I've done a couple professional jobs rooted in operations research, and frequently hear work horror tales from Eileene. A client who won't tell you what he's looking for expects you to shoot in the dark, then work out objections in piecemeal revisions, and continue them for eternity. If you are one of those foul clients, take note:

If you don't tell a consultant what you want, you aren't going to get it.

And it will take longer (and often cost more) to get what you do get.

Designers and engineers of all stripes have enormously powerful tools at their disposal. If you aren't familiar with optimization theory, you can't imagine how powerful the tools can get. Engineers can give you the closest possible match to your desires, tell you why it's impossible to get closer, and measure how much your limitations have to change to improve the match. But his models are garbage in, garbage out. If the model doesn't know you have a fixed amount of time, or money, or labor, it will likely produce a plan using infinite amounts. A designer won't know you can't put a french fry vat next to the drink dispenser unless you tell him. He can't calculate a reliable return if you don't tell him $10,000 per month is an average figure instead of a fixed one.

While a bad model might hurt a consultant's professional pride, the real disaster is that you don't get what you want...when you could. Don't conceal requirements in the interests of space, or for any other reason. Be as specific as possible. Rank your requirements in order of importance, since they often work against one another. Getting lazy at the start of a project only hurts yourself, and aggravates your consultant's ulcer.

Posted by at 8:51 PM | Permalink

So here we go: having spent half a day on buying plane tickets, and thus not writing, I should have the steam to put out a half hour’s typing without self-sabotage. Of course, before the first sentence cleared the carriage return, Eileene was asking “Whatcha up to?” so external sabotage cannot be ruled out. I could just blow this off with a “testing one-two” kind of entry, but who wants to read that? On the other hand, it is evening, and not my best writing time, so maybe sticking to a light topic is wise.

So there’s this online game called “Kingdom of Loathing.” I first learned of it a few months ago, when Brian insisted I check it out. It’s a browser-oriented MUD (multiple-user dungeon), something of a precursor to the massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) that have been so popular of late. There’s only a superficial similarity to RPGs: you do have an alter-ego, and he slays monsters and loots their treasure, but there is no room for actual role-playing and personal characterization. Your alter-ego is a pile of monster-whomping statistics; your individual identity lies in the size of those statistics and a crude differentiation in preferred tactics – slice ogres in half with a broadsword, or fry them with lightning flung from your fingertips? It’s not my cup of tea, so I looked over the welcome page and sent it to the circular file.

To call Kingdom of Loathing a low-rent MUD gives it too much dignity. You get an illustration of your alter-ego, literally a stick figure with a club, pasta scoop, or accordion to indicate profession. Graphics are black and white, and you face stick figure monsters like ninja snowmen and sabertooth limes. Ah, but that’s the charm of it, too. Kingdom of Loathing was composed in a weekend, with subsequent additions to the list of locations and monsters, and the author clearly decided, “Well, this is going to suck anyway, so why take any of it seriously?” It becomes a whole-hearted satire of MUDs in general. And the color text blurbs are silly enough to catch the attention of Games magazine, which devoted a whole page to the game.

Buried beneath all this cheese, however, is an actual, clever mechanic. Progression in MUDs is largely a matter of perseverance: play long enough, and you rack up enough ability-enhancing points – gold, equipment, experience levels, what have you – to conquer anything. Dedicated players waste weeks just grinding through monsters presenting little challenge in order to rack up these points, and players with actual lives can’t keep up. Kingdom of Loathing prevents this by limiting activity to forty “adventures” per day, a task that can be completed in fifteen minutes. Parents and professionals can keep up with the idle teenagers, and see the same wonders while they are still new and wondrous.

Fifteen minutes a day? I can spare that while I have my morning tea and bagel. And, since Games reports the whole thing, existing characters included, will be cleared out and started fresh soon to celebrate a certain degree of size and error-freedom, now’s the time to join. Get familiar with the mechanics before committing to a real session. Maybe I’ll try it.

Posted by at 9:18 PM | Permalink