Phew! It was a good job I’d prepped the Story So Far week this week, as I was kept busy by swine flu for most of the last five days. Nevertheless, I think we’re coming out of that now, and I hope it was useful for you folk to get an update on what our blogs are doing. Something a little different for this Saturday’s Thoughts, as I try and talk to you about what makes gaming great for me. Today I ask: is AI in games stupid enough yet?I’m a big fan of artificial intelligence. I find the subject fascinating, and I think games are a great playground for researchers to experiment and be creative in. AI for games broadly falls into two camps – on the one hand, you’ve got your Sharp AI, which handles games where most of the variables are discrete, by which we mean they have distinct values. A really basic example would be a chess game, where each piece can only move into a set number of places. AI likes those kinds of game.

On the other hand there’s the Fuzzy AI, which handles games where the playing field is gigantic, huge, with so many variables and so many different values for those variables that it’s almost as hard as analyzing the real world. First-person shooters fall into this category, because you can move in so many different directions and orientations, and there’s a continuous timeline in which you can act (rather than Civilization, for instance, which is turn-based). This is much harder to write good AI for.

But you all played Unreal Tournament on Godlike difficulty, right? You know we can do that pretty well. It’s a testament both to academics and to commercial software engineers that gaming AI has managed to overcome both the difficulty of the problem and the sparse resources available to them inside the average gaming machine to produce such advanced examples of AI. But there’s one small problem. I don’t want to get my arse kicked.

When I play a quick round of Left4Dead against my friends, I want a challenge, for sure. I like the fact that my opponents are creative and skilled, and that they’re probably better than me. But what I like even more is when I outwit them. Not simply besting them in skill – that’s the kind of kick you can get from Unreal Tournament. What I like is capitalising on their mistakes, fooling them into wrong actions. I like winning.

My feeling is that one day, we’re going to need to overcome this problem. It’s a big, big challenge, primarily because we’re so used to noticing ‘Bad AI’ that many gamers would probably struggle to genuinely accept an AI which made mistakes, as opposed to an AI that had been badly designed. Difficult levels in AI are often created merely by limiting the depth to which the AI can think about the game – in strategy games, for instance, restircting the number of turns they can plan ahead for.

But we don’t want to just turn a slider down and call that stupid. We need to really think about how players are outwitted, how they make mistakes. When you make a feint in Company of Heroes with a small infantry regiment, only to flank with armour, how do we decide whether our AI is going to be fooled into taking the bait? It’s a really interesting idea to research, and I hope one day we’ll really tackle it.

One way we might go about it, I think, is to harness the awesome power of human idiocy. We’re a lot better at making mistakes than a computer is, and that makes us a great source of videogame opponents. We already know this is true – look at the rise of Player Versus Player gaming in MMOs, as well as the abundance of online multiplayer modes that litter the console games. Players are great to play against because they screw up.

I think we can use this in a non-multiplayer context too. With a bit of careful consideration, player behaviour could be monitored, averaged and then shared in a Spore-like manner across many player’s games. It would take a fair bit of work to create an AI that can extract behaviours from the way players play games, but by learning to mimic humans instead of playing off a rulebook the AI would make mistakes, as well as develop genuine tactics, thus creating a richer opponent – one that is creative, but also fallible.

It’s just a thought. Perhaps we’ll push on and just create bigger and better thinking machines. But I think the real future for AI lies in keeping it stupid, stupid.

1. Learn to Edit

It is writing, at the end of the day, which means we can’t just sit back and throw up whatever comes to mind. Almost all of the links I post here could do with rewriting some parts, or even chopping some parts out entirely. The reason why no-one does this partly comes down to the meagre audiences that they get – we all know the “No-one will read this, but” syndrome that most personal blogs get, and the same goes for games writing. You care less if you think no-one’s watching.

This needs to change. The Blue Casket has started from more or less the very bottom of the internet pile. But I assumed from the beginning that I had an audience, and so tried to update every day, tried to keep the variety, tried to continue to grow. The golden rule of the Internet is to assume that people are watching – do this, and you’ll produce better stuff. That way, when people do turn up, you’ll have everything ready for them.

2. Get a Hook

The Let’s Play idea is simply to run through a game and narrate it. But the most popular Let’s Plays are the humourous ones – the ones that give a tongue-in-cheek commentary on proceedings. Comedy isn’t the best example of a hook, but it does demonstrate the difference between a Let’s Play that simply runs through a game, and one that actually offers something extra for readers, something that will make you pay attention even if you’ve already played through the game.

Hooks aren’t easy to come by, but they’re worth looking for. Charles Dickens’ hook is fairly obviously the surreality of the concept itself; The Diary of DeGeen tries to wrap a micro-scale narrative around the events in a macro-scale game; The Amateur was Hitman with a twist of ‘reluctant hero’ about it. They change a diary so much, and they make it worth linking to on other sites. Everyone’s seen the ending to Deus Ex. No-one wants to see it again. They might, however, if you were narrating the playthrough from the perspective of one of the bad guys. A good hook can transform a diary.

3. Don’t Write For You

You’re not writing so that you can go and read it again on a lonely winter’s night and reminisce. You’re writing to tell other people a story, to entertain them in some way. A lot of game diaries are either very self-indulgent, or completely impenetrable, and if you can’t get around this you’ll find your diary sinks like a lead weight. I’m not saying you should write for a lay person – some diaries, particularly the strategy game After Action Reports, are aimed at people familiar with the game in question, and that means you can take some liberties with how you write – but you should still be aware of who you’re writing for.

But it’s not really a question of whether or not your reader has played the game before or not. What’s more important is what you’re putting into words. Are you retelling a story that’s readable? That’s interesting? Are you telling it in a way that would interest someone who wasn’t there when it happened? I maintain that even a wholly linear game like Half-Life 2 can be put into a diary if done correctly, but the writer has to watch closely what it is they’re saying. It’s very hard to do this, because games by their nature are exciting for the player, so your memory of events will always seem worth retelling. Double check that they are, though, before putting them out there.

4. Learn To Shoot

Writing a gaming diary is exceptionally hard. It’s not just a case of artfully retelling a semi-linear experience in a new way; you also have to illustrate what you’re saying yourself. This is even more complicated than it sounds – while you’re playing the game, you’ll also have to be thinking about how your playthrough will affect what you’re going to write <and> you’ll be constantly framing photographs and remembering to hit the screenshot key. It’s a multitasking nightmare. But screenshots are very, very important.

A few years ago I helped out with a gaming photography community on an internet forum. Some games are so stupendously beautiful – particularly lately – that the right approach to the game can produce photographs that do come close to works of art. Learning a few photography techniques and bearing them in mind as you hammer the screenshot button will support what you write with a strong visual base. People are idiots, it’s true. They need visuals as well as the text; you have to provide the whole package.

5. Get Together

When you look at gaming communities, the key thing is that they’re all tightly linked. Fansites for a particular game all link-share and collaborate on large projects; blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun reference their fellow bloggers and receive references in return. But gaming diaries don’t really have anywhere. There’s no unified portal. A lot of the writers I feature on The Blue Casket are surprised to find that other people have written diaries – they assumed it was so obscure that only they had thought to do it.

The Blue Casket is here for two reasons. Firstly, I know a small group of very funny people who need a place to write, and this way I can offer hosting and a way to get readers for their stuff. But secondly, and equally importantly, The Blue Casket is the community portal for AARs, diaries, comics, videos, machinima, and all other metagaming things. It’s a place for people to share ideas, find inspiration and, of course, be entertained. So if you want to start a blog but don’t have any ideas, or you already have a blog (or know of one) and want to get it linked, get in touch. Email me – finalsin7 at gmail.com – and be part of the growing community here.

Next week on The Blue Casket we’ll be updating you on how our diaries are currently progressing, including a plot synopsis of all the ongoing stories so far. On Friday, we launch our next diary – The Devil’s Diary. It’s quite amusing, with a great hook, and it’s going to make you want to reinstall the game it’s based in right away (I’m doing that this weekend, in fact!). Looking forward to it. See you then!

So, this week we looked at metagaming at the movies. How did that work out? Here’s what I think.
First of all, we didn’t really do justice to Meta in Motion, what with me missing out two days like the fool I am. Stay tuned for another MiM week later in the year where we revisit the topic properly. The idea of the week was to see how people use games to tell stories in motion, both of their own and of others.

As a commenter pointed out this week, this doesn’t strictly fall under the ‘machinima’ banner, which seems to be more about making films out of programmable engines (including games); something which gaming does very well, but not strictly limited to it. I linked to The Ship first this week, because I think it’s a fantastic video, but it’s not really much like anything else on this blog.

So. Games in motion. What’s the deal.

Over at Sekrit Forum, where the authors of our hosted blogs create their masterpieces, a few of the writers are toying with the idea of supporting their next diary with video. Videos seem like a very natural way to present games to a reader/viewer, because that’s how we play them too. It takes a special kind of screenshot to really convey the viscerality of Mirror’s Edge or the triumphance of Empire: Total War. A video can bring a point across much more directly.

But there are problems with video. Primarily, it takes away a level of narrative power from the writer. Suddenly, what happens in the video is what appears on paper. There’s no room to embellish the story with a rich cast of characters as Sam does, and let’s not forget that some games are simply unsuited to video, as Charles Dickens would no doubt agree.

It’s also a lot more time consuming. Besides playing the game, editing and uploading the screenshots for a single episode can take an hour, as well as the time spent writing and (sometimes) editing what goes along with it – videos would take considerably longer. Is it really worth it?

I think it certainly can be. Our second pick of the week, Freeman’s Mind, is one of the best things to be found on YouTube. It’s a very simple concept – let’s play Half-Life, but narrate it. What’s Gordon thinking? We’ve never had a chance to hear his opinion before, so it’s an untapped mine of possibilities. But Freeman’s Mind isn’t better for having video. It’s better for having audio.

A lot of us have short attention spans; that’s why we play games. So it makes sense to put video up for people to watch while you’re telling the story. But actually having to direct, edit and script a complex video isn’t easy, and that means mostly poor results. Freeman’s Mind is clever in its use of video, because it’s not really a vehicle for anything other than a very funny script. It’s a direct translation of the screenshots-and-text format to video; there’s no dramatic sweeping cameras or action sequences as in The Robbery, seen yesterday. It’s all about the words.

Whether it would work for a detatched third-person narrator, as many of our blogs at The Blue Casket are, I’m not sure. I know my voice certainly isn’t interesting enough to retain anyone’s attention for more than five minutes. But hopefully more people will have a stab at making their diaries more visual in future, and we’ll be able to enjoy more things like Freeman’s Mind.

Tomorrow on The Blue Casket we’ve got a Let’s Play perfectly suited to Meta in Motion week, and looking ahead to next week, well… I’m away. It’s true! I’ll do my very best to schedule you something to read in the early week, but if not – I’ll see you back here after a few days.

Remember to get in touch if you’ve seen or written anything you think I might like to see. finalsin7 <at> gmail.com is the quickest way to get in touch.

They say everyone has a story in them. So far, Jim has managed to conjure up three. He’s not quite made the bestseller lists yet, and searching on Amazon for his exploits won’t turn much up either, but Jim’s stories are not the sort that often make it into print. He’s been setting his tales of heroism, comedy and pet murder in the worlds of big-budget videogames – a sort of pixel fiction, if you will – and he’s not alone. It’s a trend that’s beginning to open itself up to the broader audiences of the web.

The concept of war stories is nothing new. The thriving worlds of after-action reports (AARs) have long existed, mostly hidden away in the undergrowth of online forums and web communities. For the uninitiated, it works exactly as it sounds – you play a game, and you tell its story afterwards to anyone willing to listen. It’s particularly popular among the more meticulous and strategic gaming communities, where the method of play is more unique to you.

Paradox Interactive’s line of rich historical strategy games is a shining example – it contains a multitude of options, statistics and ways of achieving victory, as well as a setting interesting enough to make itself worthy of a little roleplay. Their forums read like the blog of a TV history channel, mixing game accounts with footage and images from the real wars and eras they are describing, creating a surreal retelling of some quite famous and, in some cases, quite recent periods in global history.

But the work of our man Jim, a mild-mannered student from England, is part of a wave of writing that’s attempting to make the concept a little more mainstream. So far, his repertoire includes tales of his Roman family’s conquest of Europe in Rome: Total War, the life and times of a man mistaken for Agent 47 in Hitman: Blood Money and the beginnings of an alternate history of Ancient Egypt in the classic strategy game Pharaoh.

His work picked up steam when he was featured on the videogames blog RockPaperShotgun, culminating in a brief spell of fame among the blogging community and a spot in U.K. games magazine Edge as Website of the Month. But Jim himself was startled to reach even a hundred readers, let alone five-figure numbers. “Having a bigger audience than I expected was a nice bonus, but I don’t particularly enjoy expectation,” he explains, as he puts the finishing touches to reposting his Rome tale on a new blog. “You should be writing about things which not necessarily everyone will see. [Gamers] read them as some extra entertainment that they can identify with after they’ve played the game.”

Jim’s Hitman blog certainly managed that, as his hapless protagonist stumbles into the world of international assassination entirely by accident and approaches his missions in increasingly ludicrous ways, from trying to “secure” explosive suitcases in lifts to his unhealthy attachment to a nailgun. And it was Jim’s first-time enjoyment of the game that allowed his blog to generate this fun. “You can write a good diary on basically anything if you like the thing and can get that across,” he says.

Tom Francis is a man who knows all about getting his love of games across to the reader. As one of Britain’s best-known PC gaming journalists, it’s unsurprising that when he chose to write a gaming diary for the website of U.K. magazine PC Gamer, readers flocked to read his account of sweeping space strategy. “I’d just reviewed [Galactic Civilizations 2], so I knew how long even an average match could take to play,” he says. “I was just curious as to what the logical extreme of that would be like.”

The logical extreme, it turns out, was to set all of Galactic Civilization’s settings to their maximum and play on the largest game map possible. Tom’s curiosity was finally satisfied 20 days later, after many dramatic entries and a good deal of unhealthily-long gaming sessions, and he emerged from his centuries of interstellar warfare with hundreds of readers following intently. But what made the story work? “GalCiv always generates great stories, because of the cheeky A.I. and the huge scale you’re playing on,” he says. But undoubtedly, it’s also the quality of the writer that makes the difference. Like any form of storytelling, spinning a great yarn is a skill that takes time to learn, and even the most noteworthy stories need a strong voice to tell them.

What’s most noteworthy about Tom’s foray into spectator gaming, however, is that a few months after his adventure concluded, he began to plan the next one – and this time, he’d be in print. Tom’s sequel to his Galactic Civilizations escapades was similar to the original, only this time with peace on the agenda rather than total domination. Yet Galactic Civilizations isn’t a very widely-played game, so is there a universal appeal to reading about someone else having fun?

“I was consciously writing for the uninitiated rather than GalCiv players,” Tom says. “Some game diaries are very in-depth, and others go the opposite way to the point that it almost reads like fan-fiction. I think both types are kind of a turn-off for people who don’t play the game.” With PC Gamer planning to release more game diaries in the same vein in coming issues, Tom must have done something right. Writer and blogger Chris Livingstone agrees.

“While [Galactic Civilizations II] is not a game I ever plan on playing, I found his journal a lot of fun to read,” he says. Chris has been writing with gaming as his inspiration for years, but he’s best known for his webcomic Concerned, set in the universe of Half-Life 2 and shot by Chris himself using in-game resources. Charting the course of Gordon Frohman, an “earnest and hardworking” citizen in the oppressive regime of Half-Life 2’s City 17, it paralleled the plot of the hit first-person shooter with quick humor and a great feel for the game’s world.

When Concerned drew to a close, Chris started up his gaming blog 1Fort, and subsequently began a game diary project set in the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. “I’d probably played about 300 hours of Oblivion and, while I still very much enjoyed being in the game, I was looking for a new way to play,” he says. What better way to do this, then, than to try and play as a non-player character, avoiding all possible avenues of adventure and instead spending time chasing butterflies and mixing potions?

If you’re already a part of Chris’ now burgeoning readerbase, then you’ll agree that there is no better way. Bizarrely, the tales of a man who runs from any source of possible excitement has somehow proved exciting in its own right, and the protagonist Nondrick has entered a month’s worth of posts, each detailing a day in his uneventful, life. What’s going on?

“There might be people who just enjoy the stories without ever having played [the games],” Chris suggests. “I was surprised to hear that a lot of people who read my Half-Life 2 comic, Concerned, had never played. I thought for sure it wouldn’t make any sense unless people knew the game.” But it doesn’t seem like this is the case; although a lot of people who read Chris’ blog and diaries are gamers, many of them haven’t played Oblivion or Half-Life 2. Instead, it’s the interplay between the game world and Chris’ own imagination that makes the entertainment. After playing the big hero for so long, it’s refreshing – and funny – to see someone do the exact opposite. “Every now and then I want to let him off the leash and tear through a couple dungeons, but it’s just not his style. So, I make him go pick weeds instead. Poor guy.”

So is this a brave new world for writers who game? Or will it remain a geeky subculture for gamers who write? Chris is optimistic that it could yet stake a claim as part of the “new media” approach to games journalism. “In the media, you mostly see reviews, and industry news, and who got fired from which developer, and how a game is selling. You have to watch the blogs and forums to find more personal stuff about gaming.” He’s right. As Jim, Tom and Chris gear up for a year of new releases and new opportunities for storytelling, it’s clear that the only thing the art needs is more readers and, perhaps more importantly, more writers. As communities strengthen and talents emerge, it’ll only be a matter of time before you get home, flick on some music and sit back with the latest copy of EVE Online Monthly. The only question is, if everyone has a story in them, what’s yours?

So now you know. Original link here.

So, what is the deal with gaming diaries, anyway? They’re all… too long and not that good. It’s fun to watch other people play games, isn’t it? Some games anyway. I have fond memories of trudging over to my friend’s house on a Saturday afternoon to watch him beat half of Devil May Cry on the PlayStation2, and spectator gaming has got it all – backseat puzzle-solving, shared moments of swearing at the screen, and of course the knowledge that if it all goes to shit then, hey, you didn’t do it.

The problem with reading about someone playing a game is that it’s not as immediately gratifying. If at The Blue Casket I posted my recent retread of the point-and-click classic Day Of The Tentacle, then you’d probably stop reading after the second post, which would consist of me saying, “Then I sat down for an hour and tried every inventory item on everything in the room.” Much like the distinction between watching a film and playing a game, reading about games lacks the potential for interaction. You can’t  be a part of it so easily.

As I trawl the internet for more things to post up here, it becomes increasingly obvious to me that very few people do this sort of thing, and so the blogs I host here are probably some of the only ones to really think about how to entertain the reader. They all take a different approach. Andrew Dunn’s Reggio Perino blog in Mount and Blade has been designed so that Andrew sets himself an overall goal that’s guaranteed to produce a lot of interesting conflict, for instance, whilst Jiiiiim’s The Amateur was powered by a self-imposed narrative about a man accidentally mistaken for an international assassin.

It needs that hook, that little something that changes the game and tells readers that even if they’re experts at this game, they’ve probably not played it quite how this guy has. And once you have that hook, as long as you’re handy with the screenshot key and willing to throw in a few jokes, then you’re probably good to go.

There are a lot – a lot – of AARs out there on the net and they’re the closest thing we have at the moment to a big metagaming community. But they’re mostly heavy to read, with overblown sections of storytelling that doesn’t really drill down to the playing of the game itself. It’s offputting, because it makes you think that perhaps there’s nothing in this idea after all. But all it needs is a bit of refinement, and a bit of forethought, to become something really entertaining.

Next week on The Blue Casket – a bunch of picks from a fresh gaming site (for me, at least!) and possibly a new homegrown diary. If the updates to the site flag a little over the coming week and a bit, don’t fret – I’m moving back to London after a stint away for personal stuff. Normal service should continue!