Simulating Worlds or Simulating Experiences
Ok, I finally gnawed off the chain on my leg. Have a few side-projects that I’ll be writing on soon enough… and I have three trillion blogs to comment on but I wanted to get things in here again.
There’s been some brainstorming in this area on a project that’s blends some gaming tech & training, and a “simulator” (some in the office cringe at the use of “gaming” even though the client uses it more than me). This has me working with many people from many of the related fields that really don’t understand games, but DO understand how to get caught up in the unnecessary details of simulation.
One of the things we hear from government clients nowadays is that they’d like to see the vast advancements in gaming tech cross-pollinate with the less-advancing industrial simulations.
It’s part encouragement to “think outside the box” and part “learn what they do abd imitate.” It takes time to explain that the games aren’t necessarily doing more (often things like AI scripting is much less than current sims) but are more effective at smoke and mirrors. The sim industry, so intent on “getting it real” can sometimes create much less realistic-looking results. I find myself playing educator in the game developers’ “art of illusion” - an art I’ve barely started learning myself- to insure that we don’t propose to do something a hundred times more complex than a-list games for one tenth the cost. The first impression of these non-gamer neophytes in addressing a simulation is akin to making a movie set by building a whole working city down to the last plumbing fixture where plywood cutouts, false fronts, and a little forced perspective would do wonders. So I’ve been evangelizing gaming tech… something like a kid with one summer’s “bible camp” behind him trying to preach to the masses, but I do my best.
It can lead to some rather interesting new perspectives for me.
One such conversation started with a “game vs world” talk. My colleague observed that it seemed odd that so many of the the “world” camp of thinkers appeared so caught up on aspects that adequately simulate the world, but were resistant to aspects that created adequately simulated behaviors.
The “classic” non-mmo example is Rampant Coyote’s Skipping, Flower-Picking Assassin. (I love “Internet Time”, by the way- where less than a year old and people refer to it as a “classic”…) On the surface, the game appears to realistically render a world, but because of those representations, we get some rather strange player behaviors emerging. It seems that many of the “artificial controls” I hear some in the pro-simulation camps lamenting over are in fact there to insure more realistic simulations of behavior among the players- things like consentual PvP and zone instances.
The “controls” that govern and moderate PvP in many games exist in part because of the vast differences in level ability, but also because of the vast lack of social mechanisms that keep us (well most of us… err… many… some… a few, maybe) from acting like savages in our daily lives. From this perspective, these controls don’t subtract from the simulation, they enrich it. Similarly, look at instances.  I greatly enjoyed my trial on the LOTRO stress test, but I had two dozen heroes skipping through the hills waiting for the next boar spawn, all to complete a quest to supply the city with much-needed food.
An “instance” of a forest, available just to your team, would have given me a more realistic experience of being isolated in a vast forest. It could lead to more realistic spawning and hunt mechanisms that just aren’t viable in the typical MMO hillside. Yet, so many people I know that focus on “world” are religiously against any such instancing or controls. It makes me wonder if we’re not just doing the same thing as the simulation crowd– focusing so much on getting something REAL, that we lose the realistic.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
As your example suggests, maybe half the trick to simulation is understanding reality FULLY before you try to simulate it. I suppose it’s a feel-as-you-go process though. Nobody seemed to understand the full depth of facial expressions until we tried to simulate them in animations. Sometimes, science rides art’s coat-tails.
When something can’t be simulated directly, you might circumvent it, as MMO designers have done with PvP. But you might also try to represent it allegorically.
For example: Let’s say you’re designing a combat simulation and you want the players (trainees) to be wary of ricochet and environmental bodies which are prone to ricochet. Simulating a realistic ricochet could be hell. If the simulated bullet rebounds in a way that’s only slightly unrealistic, the player may notice and chalk his or her error up to faulty programming, rather than personal error. But if the player’s shot on a ricochet-prone material resulted in a Darkling-like monster leaping out of the wall and biting the player’s head off (ending the simulation), then the player learns to associate his or her action with “bad” regardless of imperfect ricochet projections. By replacing a bit of reality with a bit of fantasy, the simulation encourages its participants to focus on the right things.