Column for Tuesday, 4/10 - jasona

Gamer Woad

Ok, so you've just joined the Roman Legion, and you've been marching for months and months into the Northern lands. But the comradery isn't everything the recruiter claimed it would be. All your fellow Legionaries have been whispering, when the Centurion isn't looking, about the towering barbarian hordes that that lie in wait for you. Giants who eat the flesh off of their kills, who can break a man's skull with one flex of their huge hands, who sleep with wolves and who travel leagues in complete darkness. Then, one bleak morning, as you drearily slog up a mountain pass, a riot of spine-throttling howls stop you where you stand, your feet stuck in the numbing half frozen mud. At the top of the pass, hundreds of naked, woad encrusted barbarians, smoking lye twisted in their hair, are hurtling down the cliff - perched precariously on the backs of their shields, shouting and waving their massive swords with crazed berserker abandon. The barbarians couldn't stop if they wanted to, and as their lunatic forms race ever faster towards you, you know that they wouldn't even consider it. Do you silently slide into a practiced and perfected phalanx with your fellow Legionaries? No. I don't think so. Maybe if you'd been in the legion for years and had faced the barbarian hordes before. Right now your ass is running as fast as it can from that yellow spot you left in the snow.

Did the Romans ever face giants barbarians, on snow sleds, caked in lye and woad? Well, yes, but never all at once. Sometimes giants, other times caked in lye and woad, and maybe once or twice sliding on their shields. That's not my point.

My point is that the novice Legionaries were often scared senseless by the antics of their foes.

And it's something I miss.

This is something that modern multiplayer games need to introduce. The ability to perceive the opponent, and have the opponent do something so unexpected, so unusual, that the non-veteran gamer will soil themselves on the spot. Well, maybe not so drastic, but those novices should be routed... maybe to the kitchen.

Now, I can commend several single player games on spooking the bejezus out of me at times. Particularly I remember playing Myth and gnashing my teeth and wailing with despair while some of the diary entry mission intros were read to me. But I'm not talking about single player games. Like a movie, the author of those games can place the audience just where he want, and line up the beasties in any particular way, as unusual and frightening as he wants. A single player game can give me that chill, but I want to experience it fighting my fellow man. I want to play that multiplayer first person shooter against Clan Berserker and first be spooked by a dozen ghostly voices chanting the same battle mantra and then witness my foes appear out of the wall right infront of me.

I know some of you pedantic game designers are saying "pah, that's doable right now". Sure it is. That specific example could be concocted to almost any FPS. Just use voice over IP for the howls and implement some sort of wall-ghosting mod to their server. That's not my point. You implement those changes and everyone will know that it's coming and expect it. Somehow the scope needs to be blown out of the water. How will that happen? I don't know. I don't know.

I'll tell you something I could do simulate it, though. I'd take my old Quake 2 server, who's code I knew backwards and forwards, and code up a set of interesting scenarios; even craft some plot around it. Then I'd invite a dozen of my friends to join me some night. Eight of them play the newbie force, who I'd tell bupkis to, and the other four I'd have play the Clan Berserker force, who I'd tip off to all the special abilities of the server. Sort of Live Action roleplaying meets FPS. It would be a ton of work for me (the coder and GM) for a one shot event, but it would be cool, I'd think.

Now we just need some brilliant programmer out there to think of a generic way to let a GM craft various scenarios quickly, with all sorts of mods they could plug in under the covers, to the enjoyment of all the players. Someone do it, you'll get rich.