#this is my whole fucking. area of research basically. i’m in the process of publishing an article about the lesbian earring trend.

[adaine-party-wizard]

gritting my teeth and stopping myself from getting involved in a Discourse on the misunderstanding webbed site because i know it won’t end well for me

[ecto-american]

Hey I wanted to fuck around and ramble about how I specifically headcanon and like to portray Jack and Maddie career-wise for my fanfics/personal take on the DP canon.

So to start; I headcanon Maddie as having a masters in electrical engineering and Jack as having a PhD in Thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it), though he has a bachelor's degree in mortuary science while also having a funeral director’s license.

Why these? Because I absolutely see Maddie as the builder and thinker, the one who can build things, and Jack as the theorist who knows everything there is to know about ghosts. I picked Thanatology because it was as close as I could find to studying ghosts in an actual applied scientific sense, but I liked the mortuary science because it felt like a good accompaniment. I originally had mortuary sciences as his PhD (if you’ve heard me talk about this before), but I found out that I was actually a big dumb because in the US, you cannot get a PhD in mortuary sciences ihsofsa so I did research for an alternative.

So how do their jobs work? Well, I think it's approached in a very academic-y sense. While I kind of play with it loosely based on the specific fanfiction, I generally say that their job is a sorta combination of any number of the following:

Research grants to study ghosts, from both the government and just private companies

Writing books/textbooks revolved around ghosts (like ectobiology, ghost hunting, etc)

Contract ghost hunting work (like being paid to get rid of ghosts from private residents/buildings)

Income from ghost invention patents (think their Fenton weapons and things like the Fenton thermos)

They do non-ghost research and inventing as well (since they seem to custom build their own computers and other various technologies, and even just things like the Specter Speeder can be marketed to a non-ghost hunting audience like the military, and Jazz implied in GNO that Maddie has a lot of inventions outside of Jack that she works on)

Paid to teach/give lectures or make appearances at seminars, conventions or speak at certain events

Since Jack in this is licensed funeral director, he also occasionally works with a funeral home, and sometimes I even headcanon that Jack and Maddie used to own a funeral home before they got the grant/funding to build their ghost portal (which I touch on a little later!)

Jack teaches part time at a local community college/university, teaching normally one or two classes here but sometimes more, and sometimes even as Casper High teaching ghost 101 safety

Maddie is also a licensed electrician that does occasional work related to that

And this is kind of where you may be asking: wait, aren't they kind of a joke? Why are you giving them all this credit?

Well, honestly, I really like to think of the Fentons as being actually fairly well respected academically and by fellow ghost hunters. There's a lot of scientists that you'll basically learn are real Weirdos, but that doesn't distract from the fact that they are incredibly smart people who made amazing breakthroughs.

To me, I headcanon Jack as being autistic, and that ghosts and the paranormal is a special interest in which he's actually an incredibly well respected scientist, who has the most accurate (as far as the paranormal studies scientific community knows) information and knowledge about ghosts. He's been writing and studying it for twenty years, and arguably, essentially proved that ghosts exists because of his ghost portal and living in Amity Park, where ghost activity boomed. While there's canon evidence dedicated to him being made fun of in Million Dollar Ghost, I personally like to think of this as more of other ghost hunters just kind of seeing how Awkward and ridiculous he can be socially. We also hear about Danny and Jazz dunking on them, but I think this comes more from two teenagers being embarrassed about their oddball parents.

I definitely picture the Fentons as still being the town weirdos because well. You see their oddballness every day. But most ectobiologists would only see Jack when he's presenting and read his work, where I imagine he's presented as a bit less goofy and more serious. Because it's a chance for him to essentially ramble on about his special interest and area of expertise without interruption to an incredibly eager audience that's going to be asking questions and wanting his opinions. To me, Jack definitely seems like the person who you don't really think about how odd he kinda is (purely because of masking and it just not really coming up) until you're really with him 1v1 outside of these of these conventions/lectures/classroom environments.

I don’t totally see Maddie teaching, because while I’m definitely picturing her here as being a very smart mind that would likely also be a good teacher; the specific reasoning why I say Jack would be the ones that does the teaching part time is because it’s literally perfect for him. It's an excuse for him to trap 25+ people in a room on a regular basis to listen to him about ghosts. He'd absolutely just one of those easy A teachers, where if you just show up and listen to him babble about ghosts for 1-3 hours and turn in the homework (he gives no tests, midterm/finals or quizzes), you get your easy A. It’s the similar concept with the seminars and guest lecture things; Jack is just much more enthusiastic and would want that solo speaking time, and Maddie knows how much it means to him, so I feel like she would let him have this.

Maddie herself, I feel liker her heart rests more in just the general inventing and building side of it. While she has an interest in ghosts, this also seems to mostly enjoy the physical side of inventing. I say this mostly because, again, in GNO, Maddie has a whole bunch of inventions that she’s working on outside of things she builds/helps Jack build. To me, this straight up personal invention projects, even though they’re still ghost based, tells me that her heart and passion seems to lie within engineering and not necessarily too much in the way of ghost theory.

The way his and Maddie's relationship works to me is that Jack knows more of the ghost related information and he relays this to Maddie for her to build what they need. For example, he'll tell her “this is what the Ghost Zone is like, these are the dangers, this is what we need to survive, etc” and Maddie will have the knowledge to design the Specter Speeder, and they build it together with Maddie being the primary leader and troubleshooter.

However, Maddie has the education and license to do the electrical work and knows how to properly build and submit the patents. Meanwhile, Jack will eventually do all the research and write and publish the book detailing what they learned about the Ghost Zone. Repeat the process with ghost weapons and other such inventions.

I like to think that Jack and Maddie were essentially going through the process of getting the huge government grant they'd need to build the actual ghost portal, which took a lot of prior research, convincing, pleas for money and getting the city permission and code permits to get the money and permission building it, hence the like 20 year gap between the prototype portal and the final portal. Especially since they obviously started a family during that time too.

[klutzymaiden123]

Some Tips on How I Keep Motivating Myself to Write

This post was inspired by a response I recently got from @pastelnightgale and obviously, I’m not an expert (I’m literally on year 6 of a fanfic rip), but I still wanted to type something up about this. 

I find that the hardest part about writing is finding the motivation to actually start it . . . and then keep it. You can have all of these intricate fantasies in your head, with twists and turns and even a playlist you made on spotify, but actually getting up and writing it is ridiculously hard. 

Especially if, like me, you suffer from perfectionism. 

I kinda wanted to write a post about how I personally motivate myself to write, both fanfiction and my own things. Obviously, what I write is flawed and needs a lot of improvement, but I’ve come really far and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. 

So, here’s some tips I’ve picked up over the years. Feel free to apply this to whatever art you personally create, but this is primarily for writers.

1) Listening to Music

This is my number one. Easily. I’m someone who has a lot of attachment with the music I listen to (as most people do, I’d assume). Though I’m picky with the overall sound, I prefer music or artists who really put a lot of thought into their lyrics specifically. Or even when they use certain effects to carry across emotions or add more emphasis to specific lines. It’s why I’m such a fan of Taylor Swift; her songs are basically poetry packaged as pop music. 

It personally helps me to listen to music not just because it’s enjoyable, but it helps create scenarios in my head. We all shoot music videos in our head, why not try doing it with your characters? Plus, if the artist you’re listening to plays with words through metaphors or similies or imagery, it’s a massive bonus. I seriously recommend turning to music, whatever genre you listen to, and letting that sometimes paint the picture for you.

2) watching Movies. 

This is a massive one for me. I don’t know how high this would be on anyone else’s lists since films are obviously a completely different medium to books, but I find there’s a lot of things that can be useful about movies. For one thing, movies just have better fight sequences. Kinda obvious statement, but I don’t mean in a ‘well you can see it so therefore film is better’ no, I mean, film literally has better action sequences. 

Obviously, as a writer, you’re never going to be able to properly adapt the quick pace of fights in movies. But you can adapt the details in how they move. Fight scenes in movies are better then books because they’re choreographed. Now granted, I’m still beginning my journey in reading, but so far, I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve seen. Either the author writes a scene that describes the action, but with no focus on the strain it has on the character’s bodies, or they gloss over the fight completely. It makes me feel like I’m reading fanfiction, but written from the younger side. 

It’s just super dissapointing, so I try to challenge myself by studying how the characters moves, the impact of their movements on each other, and then how tired that can leave them. 

But also, movies can have other things that I think writers should learn to adapt. Like a character’s mannerisms. Now, I don’t just mean mannerisms as in what they do in their day to day lives, I mean facial ticks. Like, the minute sequences their features will go through as they’re processing news. Or their stances. Or what they do with their hands. Actors are very detailed about how they’re protraying their characters, and I just find myself aching to carry that over in my own portrayal of my characters.

It’s obviously important to realise that film and novels have both their benefits and disadvantages in what they can and can’t portray. But it’s even more important to realise that different mediums can also teach us things about our sense of portrayals.

3) Reading books

This may be surprising that it’s not number one, but honestly, I didn’t start reading actual books until late last year. I kinda used to read some in high school, but those were few and far between. This year I’ve actively been trying to emerge myself in more professional writing, as I do find it a little strange to want to write so badly without taking any infleunce from any other writers. 

Previously, I used to take inspiration from fanfiction and fictionpress, which I guess I still do. There’s definitely benefits in exclusively reading them (for instance, I prefer characterisation, romance and comedy in fanfiction) but I personally find books to be better in overall world building. I mean, obviously.

World building and setting are my weak spots, and I find that reading literal books actually helps me easier improve on these areas. Oh, and length. I’m a pretty detailed writer, but it’s sometimes hard to navigate what should and shouldn’t be getting so much focus. Fanfiction is pretty short (typically only a few pages), but books can be a whole lot longer, and how they use that space and length helps me translate it into my own pages. Granted, I tend to write way too much, but it’s still really helpful in navigating what should and shouldn’t be getting focus.

Oh, and bonus points for booktubers. They review a variety of different books, and for me personally, whenever they critique books, it motivates me to write something brilliant so they could maybe read it and smile. My favourites are WithCindy and Dominic Noble.

4) Tumblr—Specifically writing blogs. 

When I tell you that I did nothing in my last years of high school but secretly read fanfiction and writing blogs on tumblr in class, I--

Obviously, I’m biased, cause I’ve been reading tips on here since I was a kid, but I really recommend following some good blogs on here. They give such good advice, specifically on how to research, or portray certain emotions and, most of all, representation. Tumblr was actually where I learnt to write my fight scenes—about how to portray the feeling of a quick sequence of events, while balancing it out with your character’s limited view. They write things I haven’t even seen professionals talk about (and honestly, I think they could benefit from reading a tumblr blog). 

My personal favourite blogs are: Nimble’s Notebook, and Clevergirlhelps

5) Re-writes.

Okay, this is a massive one I should’ve mentioned in the beginning. Never compare what you have on your word doc to what others have published. Why? Because I can tell you that they did not start off like that. They went through massive amounts of editing and drafting and re-reads before coming out like this clean cut version. Trust me. No one’s that quick. And even if they are, who cares? It could take you two drafts, it could take you four, it could take you nine--we all work at our own pace.

It’s something I have to keep reminding myself when I’m on my first and second draft. Because they are shit. I always feel untalented when writing my first draft--oh, and that’s not a purposeful dig at myself to get compliments, I genuinely mean that. I will never let someone read one of my early drafts because they are literally so bad, and not only that, but those drafts are for me. They’re not there for anyone else yet. Early drafts are just so you can start to build your empire, they’re your foundation. You can reach for the sky the more you keep building. 

Don’t get on your own case if you don’t like your first draft. It’s fine. It gets so much easier the more you rewrite it. Trust me.

6) Write Things for You.

This is one of my favourite tips. Oh, and I don’t mean it in a ‘you’re not writing for an audience, you are the audience’ kinda way. No, I mean literally write things for you. And only for you.

If you have a story in your head that you don’t want to write because you know it’s just a phase, it won’t last long enough for you to make something out of, or you’re not confident in it, or whatever, fuck it—just write it. 

Open your word doc and type it out. Then don’t post it. Or share it. Keep it on your computer, stored away in a folder you won’t ever share. You might be asking, why would you waste your time on a project no one will ever see? Simple. 

It takes away the pressure.

A major hindrance to a writer actually writing is sometimes . . . not feeling good enough. You’re worried that an audience will laugh or mock what you’ve written, or that it won’t turn out just the way you planned it too, or even that the plot is too corny. Well, what I’ve found is that writing for myself stops me from judging myself so badly. I have so many documents on this computer of corny borderline wattpad stories that will never see the life of day. And it feels great. Cause I’m still actively writing and improving myself while eliminating that huge amount of anxiety that plagues me. 

This is such a massive tip, please consider it. Obviously, if the story turns out really well, go ahead and post it if you’re super proud of it. But otherwise, just write something with the intention of not sharing it. Keep it to yourself, so you can look back on it with fond memories. 

[supporthosechi]

Visitation Reflection June 21st, 2018

Alisha was nervous about us driving in the rain. She called twice to check on us while we were on the road. It’s about three hours without traffic or under normal weather conditions. It took us a long while to reach the prison because the torrential downpour forced us to take it slow almost the entire way. Using phone calls (anyone who is used to how expensive and precious they are will tell you) to check-in on us was beyond considerate, and was not thrifty. It was touching to be checked-in on, something that we wish we could do for her, whenever the want or need to will arise. Unfortunately calls from prison are just that, from and not to. You have to wait to check up on your loved ones. When a few days go by and there’s silence, you are forced to infer the worst, because of the shitty prison mandated phone usage protocol.

The rain flooded the low roads practically the whole way to Decatur. It was nerve wracking and I felt terrible--we were panicking our friend.

We have not seen Alisha since her (incredible) Shakespeare performance in April and were beyond excited to catch up. We brought zines (Support Ho(s)e Year One, A Survivor: Alisha Walker, and Client & Co-Conspirator) as well as the comic book about our first visit with Alisha called “No One’s Victim,” published by Vice Versa Press, to try and include them in a property drop off (as a property officer had advised me over the phone) since the past four times we’ve tried sending them, they’ve gone missing. We also brought more money for snacks during our visit. As we pulled into the visitor’s parking lot it was really pouring. We grabbed all of our identification, cash, vending machine money card, zines and shoved everything down our shirts as we hurried in the cold rain toward the processing area.

I hate this place. We hate this place. Everyone should hate this place.

We walk in: “What’s that under your shirt?!” A CO yells out as soon as we come in from the storm. A has all of the precious print material we’ve brought for Alisha protected from the rain under his shirt. We look up, “it’s raining, they’re publications we’re dropping off.”  I’ve met these COs on duty at least half a dozen times and they still ask if I’ve visited before. I say yes, they hassle me about my expired driver’s license and my renewal print-off. They hassle us about the zines and comic. This really infuriates us. The zines and comic look “homemade” (they are). We can’t drop them off...we have to mail them in…only “publications” are admitted this way. I plainly explain that they were purchased (they were not) publications. They say that doesn’t matter. I ask what constitutes as “publication.” They say a professionally produced magazine or book. I explain about Vice Versa Press publishing the comic...they say it still looks “homemade,” and the won’t approve it. They tell me I have to mail them.

I raise my voice. I rarely do this.

“I have tried mailing them in. Four times.” They tell me I must be mailing them wrong...Then they look through them more and see a photo of LeLe that appears to be a screen shot of her during a video visitation. They start lecturing me on how this could get her a citation and list-off creative punishments if this is the case. I ask them if they’ve ever used skype or known someone who used skype before they were locked up. They didn’t get my inference so I said I didn’t take a pic of her during a video visit and removed myself from the intake area to go piss before the full screening/inventory. I splash water on my face, I look like shit. I am so fucking angry. We lock up the zines and comic in our locker with our IDs, and it’s A’s turn to take a piss. I go through screening first. The CO begins lecturing me again about video visitation protocol.  

I’m better at playing dumb and nodding this time.

She sends me through to a room where she touches my breasts and makes me take my shoes off. She grabs my hair bun and yanks, “just making sure!” ...Of what, if I feel pain?

A is screened next, I can hear the CO who’s screening him offer a similar lecture. A is better at keeping calm, he always is. We go into the visitation room and LeLe’s wing mate is there having a visit with her brother, his kiddo and another friend. Alisha comes in shortly after this, a complete 180 from our last visit where we waited hours to see her after the play. The kiddo is very interested in us and Alisha for most of our visit, asking questions and dancing around, showing off her daisy barrettes that make truly wonderful sounds as she throws her head around dancing-- they click and clack into each other.

We take a photo. We laugh wildly because LeLe sprang this on us, and quite frankly A and I were not our most photogenic--but of course LeLe was! She had on some gold eyeshadow she had made.

LeLe had her hair done-up differently, in a half-bun; it’s lighter, the sun bleaching it more and more because she’s been working outside, a new job cutting grass that she’s really liking because she’s left alone and gets exercise. She makes $30 a month doing (at least) 8 hour shifts per day, every day. She does the entire prison grounds over the course of the week. Essentially she gets $1 per day for her labor.

She’s giddy and nervous, in a good way. She likes a fellow visitor in the room and it shows. More on that when that fact doesn’t threaten either of them…

She spends the visit mostly talking about wanting to go to college, and talking about the research we’ve been doing on correspondence courses and how she can best get an Associates degree while inside. She updates us on what she’s reading, she’s deep into “Invisible No More” by Andrea Ritchie and she’s revisiting “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.” We talked about afrofuturist sci-fi (a genre she adores) and how she’s basically doing upper level college reading already. She reminds us she’s still got like 60 books from supporters for her birthday to go through, and how thankful she is for this.

As an aside--after she reads a book, she donates it to the prison’s library which is woefully understocked and most features self-help books (she despises these) and romance novels (she tolerates these).  

We talk prison medical treatment (we agreed it’s bogus to use the word “care” in relation to anything in a prison) and how fucked it is. She started taking birth control and now she really can’t stand chow hall meat. She’s been craving fruit and juice and yogurt. Things she can only get when we visit and buy them from the vending machines...and that’s if the machines are stocked. Thankfully they are, so we can. She gets her fruit and yogurt fix.

We do our normal organizing debrief to wrap up our visit, filling her in on project ideas, taking cues and inspiration from her thoughts. We talk about the other folx we’ve been talking to inside and what they’re thinking and feeling. She reports back on her contacts some more. It’s like working with someone who can read your mind or at least anticipate the capacity/building/organizing needs. It’s pretty fucking remarkable. That’s gotta be what’s meant by the saying “find your people.” She says she’s ready to be free--she’s been ready. She’s “got work to do.” 

- Red 

[archonreviews]

The Archon’s Review of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a fantasy role-playing game developed by Big Huge Games and published by Electronic Arts. In the fantasy realm of Amalur, Fate has dictated the comings and goings of all things. Particularly sensitive to the workings of Fate are the immortal Fae, whom are divided into the Summer Court and the Winter Court. However, tragedy strikes when a rebellious Winter Fae named Gadflow decides that the current Winter King isn’t doing enough murder, and that he should be king instead. After killing the Winter King and usurping his throne, Gadflow and his followers, the Tuatha Deohn, go to war against the mortal races of Elf, Gnome, and Human. The mortals seem doomed, as while the Tuatha can be killed, they reincarnate quite quickly and return to fight, whereas the mortals die when they are killed. To circumvent this disadvantage, a Gnome by the name of Fomorous Hughes creates the Well of Souls, a device meant to resurrect the dead. You are its first apparent success, and in the process of reviving, you become unbound from Fate, and basically ruin it for everyone. Now, you are the last hope for mortal-kind to defeat the villainous Gadflow and his Tuatha followers, restoring balance to the Fae Courts and preserving the realm of Amalur.

I first heard of Kingdoms of Amalur back in the mid-2000′s, just around when I was playing Oblivion obsessively. It was contemporary with another third-person fantasy thingie, Two Worlds, which the GameStop employee recommended against, before trying to shill for GameInformer. I suppose my point here is that I picked up KoA:R because I was curious to see what I had missed all those years ago. And yes, I am aware of the controversy surrounding the game’s creation and the dismantling of Big Huge Games, but I must confess to not being too familiar with the happenings.

The first thing one may notice in this game is the graphics. They’re actually pretty damn good, with beautiful vistas and vibrant landscapes. The characters are surprisingly expressive, even if that expressiveness does result in some humorous facial expressions. The character models are a little funny though; all the men, at least, have what I like to call “Ground Beef Body”. I ended up naming my character “Flaskkott Djur”, or “Pork Animal” in Swedish because he immediately reminded me of a hunk of ground beef (I got the word “Flaskkott” confused with the word “Nottkott” which is “Beef”. There’s your Swedish lesson for the day).

(Just look at that chin! And he’s got the neck of an ox to boot!)

Speaking of vistas, the diversity of environments is greater than I might have expected; although, get ready to see plenty of magical forests. There are, however, plenty of deserts, beaches, swamps, and arid landscapes to explore, all with plenty of monsters to kill and things to loot. All the environments are quite pretty and vibrant to behold and great emphasis has been placed on making each area feel like its own self-contained region. Even the magical forests feel different enough from one-another that you’re not likely to get lost.

(Upward shot of one of the game’s major cities. Go all the way south, along a beach and across a desert and through a forest, and you’ll find a Greco-Roman city ruled by Gnomes, as opposed to this necropolis-looking thing.)

Character creation is interesting. You only have two choices at the start; race and deity to worship. Funnily enough, you can choose to be an atheist, and it may be the best choice in my opinion, not because I’m some trilby-wearing “Dark Enlightenment” nutter, but because being an atheist gives you a permanent +1% experience point boost, and I’m always a slut for levelling up. All the other deities give you different boosts, and each of the four playable races gives you certain bonuses to non-combat skills.

When I say that you only have two choices at the start, I was leading up to something. See, KoA:R sort of has you create your character throughout the entire game. Every time you level up, you get a point for non-combat skills and for combat abilities. You could easily make the case that all RPG’s do something similar, having the player build up their character over the course of the game, but the difference is that KoA:R basically gives you nothing to begin with, save for a few points in all the beginning combat skills, plus a few points in non-combat skills dependent upon your chose race. Most other RPG’s would at least give you a bit more than that, if only to establish a direction. KoA:R is unique in that building your character is a persistent, fluid process, which keeps it engaging; in addition, the ability to refund all your points for a small fee allows you to go back and try a different build should you get curious/ fed-up.

One side-note I’d like to make mention of: If you’re the sort of person who gives a shit about difficulty curve, don’t buy the “Weapons and Armor Bundle” DLC. As the name would suggest, it creates a chest in the first town filled with weapons and armors for you to grab and use at your leisure. And while you’ll get/craft better equipment in time, it’s still better than the equipment you would otherwise have at the time, and it throws the balance off for a bit.

Speaking of crafting, the game actually has a pretty rad crafting system which allows you to create equipment, potions, and socketable gems. And frankly, once you put enough points into the requisite skills, you can craft some frankly ridiculous things. After a while, I was salvaging nearly all my equipment for the spare parts, rather than selling it. Gold wasn’t much of an issue anyway, and I wanted to see if I could craft an even more effective murder tool.

If it seems like I’ve been avoiding the topic of combat for a while, it’s because I’ve been avoiding the topic of combat for a while. Honestly, I think it’s one of the weaker elements. It’s slow and cumbersome, and it’s completely possible to be hit for a full combo because you couldn’t get your fucking shield up in time because you were already swinging at a different enemy. Whenever I swung my sword, I was committed for roughly the next half-hour. Also, for those of you more used to Dark Souls styled dodge-rolling, I should warn you that the dodge-roll in this game does not seem to have any invincibility frames; it just zips in a direction real quick is all.

(Spiders rather quickly became my arch-nemeses. They always came in groups, attacked somewhat unpredictably, and where often harder to kill than might be expected.)

To be fair, once you level up a bit and develop your own tactics, combat becomes easier. Learning your enemies’ attack patterns and learning abilities that stagger them, or prevent you from being staggered will help immensely.

If the plot synopsis up there seemed kind of involved and a little faffy, it’s because that’s how the game is. Ostensibly, the whole thing is based on old Irish and Scottish myths about the fae, and while the influence is clearly there, and it’s clear that the devs at least did a modicum of research on the mythologies they use. I like the idea of fighting Fate, the rapacious bastard. Although, there’s a bit where it’s implied that you’re appearance (remember, your character exists outside the web of Fate) was itself predicted by Fate. As others have pointed out, that point is kind of mad, but it’s not as big a deal as it sounds, and there’s evidence to suggest that perhaps Fate has simply rewritten itself to fit you in.

(The antagonist either screaming in madness or receiving amazing head. I’ll let you decide.)

Now, I have a bit of a confession to make. I spent almost my entire time playing this on sidequests. Much work has been done to ensure that the sidequest chains are engaging, from helping the resident mercenary guild fight an invading demon lord and his army of elven followers, to saving a small village from a rogue Fae and her spider minions. I had a lot of fun on all the sidequests; I almost forgot about the critical path. By the time I got back, I was massively overlevelled and had a set of powerful equipment to back me up.

Here’s a weird thing apropos of nothing: while the human ladies are dressed normally (boob-plates notwithstanding), the elven ladies are almost always in some kind of revealing top, often a deep V-neck. I have no idea why this is; there’s no lore reason for it. Maybe Big Huge consisted entirely of elf-misogynists? It’s bizarre is all.

(She’s just dressed like this. No idea why, especially when a normal human wearing leather armor has it look like regular leather armor.)

Now, some people have compared this game to Skyrim; certain reviewers even calling it “Baby’s first Skyrim“ I don’t necessarily think the comparison is a fair one. Whereas Skyrim is very much a standard fantasy RPG in the vein of its forebears, KoA leans more heavily on semi-frenetic combat action, even bumping up against the (admittedly nebulous) action-adventure genre in the subway car. Crafting is different as well. Whereas Skyrim has you stock up on ores and ingots to craft with, this game has you salvaging your old weapons to find screws and grips and rivets, which gives the crafting a different feel, even if they are functionally very similar. While Skyrim is admittedly a more detailed, immersive experience (glitches notwithstanding), KoA is about as complicated as it needs to be. It gets in all the features it needs to be a pretty good game in its runtime.

And Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a pretty good game. Levelling up is more addictive than it is in most RPG’s, and great pains have been taken to make sure that each quest is fun and interesting, not just the main questline. Despite the reputation it’s accrued as a cut-rate Skyrim or “That one game what got a bunch of people in trouble and now it’s owned by Rhode Island,” I’d recommend it to anyone who likes somewhat complex fantasy worlds and/or anyone who likes their RPG’s a little bit on the actiony side. I may come back to it. After all, I’m more than half-way to the level cap and I’m not even close to the end of the main quest.

All in all, it’s a damn fine game. Would love to complete it some time.

(A back shot of a male character. I told you these people are made of ground beef.)

[luninosity]

That's so cool! Thanks for sharing ❤️ I'm a little intimidated by the whole process of getting a phd, I'm currently in a master's program and start in the fall. Any tips for success?

Some specific things will depend on your program and coursework, but, a few general tips:

-get to know your professors! as a grad student, you are a future colleague, and they want you to succeed just as much as you do! Plus, useful professional relationships!

-go to conferences early and often - it gets your work out there, and your name out there, and you meet brilliant people who are enthusiastic about their fields, and who introduce you to more people! And sometimes you can throw an essay collection style book proposal together using conference papers! It is okay if you are shy and awkward. Many academics are. But we like to talk about the things that excite us, like our fields of study! So just throw some questions out there!

-also think about publication; probably anything you write in the first semester or two will be wobbly, but after that, treat every piece of research you produce as potentially publishable. This helps with your CV, of course, but also is part of the point of research: sharing it with the scholarly community, not just letting it languish on your laptop. :-)

-take the hoops one at a time. The MA has certain goals; the coursework etc is designed to help you reach those goals. The PhD has certain goals, and the work you do is designed to help you reach those goals. I remember, in my last year of coursework, sitting in a Renaissance lit seminar, and actually feeling - not like I knew *everything*, because you never ever will, but like I could say something with relative confidence and enough expertise to make a difference to the class discussion. And that was when I went, oh, okay, yeah, I can do this - I’m more of an equal in this field than I used to be, certainly more so than the first years in this seminar. (Amusingly enough, that professor also started asking my opinion on some of the more fantastical elements of some of the plays, since the fantasy genre was one of my areas, so I ended up talking a lot!) Basically, trust that you will grow as a student and a scholar.

-don’t be afraid of or ashamed of getting tired or discouraged or even questioning being in academia. It happens. I mean, I’ve thought about leaving academia; I’m not really teaching in my specialties, the job market is shit (sorry, but it is), and the American public university system, especially the humanities, is gravely fucked (sorry again, but again, it is: be aware, and any responsible advisor will tell you so). I stay because, well, I currently *have* at least *a* job, and because I genuinely love the teaching part, the moments when you say something about, oh, 11th century werewolf stories, or monster theory, or the rhetorics of fantasy, and a student just gets it and lights up and their world expands a little bit more; or the moments in the Writing Center when a student who has been struggling comes back in and says, “I got an A on this paper!” We make a difference. We really do, and I believe that. That does not mean it is necessarily enough to stay in academia; I have several brilliant friends who have left PhD programs or in some cases tenure-track jobs due to lack of institutional support, frustration with the system, a realization that they didn’t actually like teaching or maybe they didn’t like doing research (which can be isolating and lonely) all that much, you name it. Nothing wrong with that either; choices are always personal. So know that: it’s always a choice you make about what feels right for you. :-)

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Note: This post (originally published at darklorde.com) is all about the Engines of Play. If you are not familiar with Taste/Satisfaction Maps and their uses, the Big 5, Self-Determination Theory, etc, I highly recommend watching this video before reading the article. It will make so much more sense. Like, Oh Em Gee.]

A Random Encounter With Relic

I’m in San Francisco. It’s GDC, so the sidewalks of the Moscone Center are packed to bursting with nerds of every stripe. The day is bright. I cross Fourth street, on my way to Moscone North--and someone calls, “Jason!”

I wasn't surprised--it happens to me a lot at GDC. Stay in the games biz for long enough, and GDC will eventually become one big reunion.

What happened next, though, absolutely does not happen every day.

A friendly-faced fella pushes his way out of the crowd, and introduces himself as one Mitch Lagran, a Lead Designer at Relic Entertainment. While I unsuccessfully suppressed my fanboy reaction (because DAWN OF WAR OMFG), Mitch explains that he had attended my Engines of Play talk last year...

...and that Relic had actually implemented the methods I had laid out in that talk.

He claimed that he wanted to thank me for it because it had made a huge difference to their process and was great stuff. I stared at him and tried to think who had put him up to this.

I mean, no one actually implements that stuff. Come on! That’s not how the GDC works!

The GDC is supposed to be a place where you go and listen to people talking about lessons and techniques--ones that you desperately wish you could apply because wow it would make your dev life so much better--and then you go back to your studio and everyone tells you about how yeah maybe that stuff worked for those guys, but that it won’t work here, see, because our situation is different.

And then you sigh, and maybe you try again in three months. Eventually you just go about your business.

GDC is not where RELIC FREAKING ENTERTAINMENT goes to find whole new process for their game conception phases.

But, here’s this guy, and he’s shaking my hand, and he's expressing his gratitude and his appreciation, and I so I play it cool and say, “Really?! You… actually used my stuff?!?"

He nods.

I ask, "Uh… so, what happened?!”

He told me. Later, he sent me a more detailed description of what the results had been. And what he said blew my mind.

So, I asked him if I could write it up, and share it.

A More Proper Introduction

That’s the back story for what this post is about. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present something akin to an actual case study for what happens when you apply the Engines of Play (which includes these charts called Taste Maps, and the process of analysis that goes into them) to a real dev environment.

Hrm.

By “actual case study” what I really mean is “the guys at Relic were kind enough to describe in some detail what they did with the ideas, and what the results were”. That isn’t quite a full case study. It's more like a front-line report or something. BUT STILL. CLOSE ENOUGH.

I mean COME ON! How often does this kind of thing just happen?! Never. That's how often.

A quick reminder: The Engines of Play is a way to figure out what kind of player taste you are trying to target with your game, in a way that is quite a bit more specific than “achievers” or “shooter players”. The methods involved do require a little bit of coming-up-to-speed, but they benefit from being both fairly intuitive and being backed up by systems that have a metric-fuck-ton of academic white papers and research done on them.

Remember all that? No? Well, here's a couple of videos for you.

Good now? Great!

A Conversation With Relic

I mentioned earlier that Mitch Lagran was kind enough to send me a long description of how he and his team have used said Engines. For our purposes here, I think it’s best if I let Mitch speak for himself.

Mitch: Hey Jason, it was nice getting to meet you down at GDC. Hope you had a good one this year.

Likewise. You have a cool beard.

Mitch: Given that you seemed interested in feedback around our use of Engines of Play at Relic, I figured I’d give you a run-down of how we’ve used it and how it has worked out.

You da man.

Prepro: Good

Mitch: It’s worth keeping in mind that we are still early on in our production, so we haven’t started adapting your model with a production oriented mentality yet. I’m guessing that when we do, there may be some slight shifts on how we use it to communicate.

I can tell you from experience that its use in production is likely to simply diminish. Once the key design targets have been set, we found that the model drifts into the “background lore” of the project. It doesn’t seem to be all that useful during the meat of production.

We did find that near the end of production we experienced a brief resurgence in interest in the work. As we prepared our communication plans, and as the game was starting to come together, there was a storm of new conversations around confirming whether or not we had built what we had intended to build--and Taste Maps are great for that.

At that point, too, there were a lot of new people coming onto the project who had not been exposed to the method, and both found it surprising that we had done all that work so far in advance and found it surprising that it seemed to work.

So: high use in preproduction. Low use during production. Brief flurry of use right as the launch plans are being discussed in earnest for the first time. That was our experience, anyway.

I look forward to learning whether or not your experience turns out to be similar!

Broad Appeal

Mitch: Overall we’ve found a fairly strong degree of success in using it both as a design lens and as a communication tool for the team.

It came along as part of a larger initiative pushing towards more intent driven design and as a part of a broader design structure shift, so it is a bit difficult to separate its effects from everything else, but it has been called out as a valuable part of the changes.

It has seen praise that extends from our executive level down to junior devs, which seems pretty damn impressive to me.

I know, right?!?

That was the part about this approach that surprised me the most—that so many completely different groups of people involved in the production found it to be useful.

I originally designed the approach as a tool for designers, and expected that the sell would be a hard one with the marketing and business teams. But we found quite the opposite to be true! The biz people were enthusiastic, and (in my experience) already prepared to look at our game through this lens. Instant adopters.

I am psyched to hear that this might be a repeatable phenomenon.

Satisfaction Is Hard

Mitch: Generally, taste maps have had a stronger adoption than satisfaction maps.

I think that may be partly due to me not having pushed satisfaction maps quite as strongly, so it’s something I am planning on trying to work on (especially because I want to ensure that we have a strong connection to the PENS model on our team).

However, I also think that it is because Taste Maps include a more visual component, so team members find them easier to latch onto and express. Given that, I am hoping to explore some ways to present the satisfaction maps / PENS model in a way that will give people a stronger connection to it.

I found the same thing. I think there are many complicating factors here.

Here's one: I found that discussing satisfaction is just harder than discussing taste. My theory is that because its effects are so much more remote than the immediate-gratification of taste that most people are simply under-prepared to think about the whole concept. I know that I was, and that it took long years of effort to really get the feeling for how satisfaction works. It’s still a work in progress for me, in fact.

That said: wow is long-term satisfaction important. I have come to understand that if you make a game that only offers short-term taste satisfaction, that people will play it for 30 minutes and then never come back. The core three satisfactions of Self-Determination Theory / PENS give us the reasons why people will come to believe that your game is worth spending some of their precious time on this planet on.

It is tricky to think about. But learn it: the success of your game depends on it.

(I agree with you about the part about the visual component for SDT kinda sucking. I think the way I laid out satisfaction maps was sort of a cop-out, and deserves a better approach than just “fill in these three boxes”. We’ll see if something better can be developed.)

Brand Analysis FTW

Mitch: As our team is not working on a new IP,

(FOR THE EMPEROR!!!!)

we might have had some different uses for it than you on For Honor. Specifically, we went through an early exercise analyzing past entries in our franchise using taste maps and satisfaction maps.

That’s... so... cooooooooooool!!

Mitch: This was part of a larger effort aimed at a reverse / hindsight engineering of the overall creative direction of the franchise. Engines of Play was a hugely valuable tool in this process.

It gave us a strong lens to view the successes of the franchise through. We then used that to base future development off of.

We basically took the franchise maps as a base that we should build on, and used the taste maps as a way to choose targeted areas we wanted to improve. Our output was ultimately an overlay of the two, showing the original franchise maps with our targeted improvements on top.

This also gave us a tool to discuss the scope of both improvements and maintenance (the latter being the amount of work required to maintain the same degree of success in any specific axis in a modern iteration of the franchise).

So basically, if we had rated the franchise has having best-in-class coop in the initial taste-map, we did an assessment of how changes in coop play in modern games would affect our ability to hit that mark.

From there, we would choose specific areas where the past franchise had scored lower and we felt would be strong candidates for ratcheting up the next iteration, based on how feasible it would be to fit into our scope and how closely the different axes aligned with existing creative direction.

I am so impressed by this. I had some vague notion as we were working on this that you could maybe apply taste maps to genres, or something, but I never investigated it. What you describe here, with taste map overlays (overlays!!) frankly seems so obvious now that you’ve explained it that I am going to just adopt it into my design process.

I also adore the idea of re-evaluating the viability of your features through the lens of “are we still best-in-class?” during pre-production. That sounds to me like a process that literally everyone involved in production could get behind, understand, and participate in.

Good one, guys.

Brand Satisfaction Is Stable

Mitch: In the process above, Satisfaction Maps were used in a similar way. We used them to establish where the sense of satisfaction has come from in the past, with the idea that we can use that as a required foundational base.

Basically, it gave us the parts of the game we should not disturb, but should instead aim to improve and build around.

It’s funny, right? Satisfaction theory (SDT, etc) is so damned important, but once the core pieces are in place and working (which, if you have made a successful game, must be true), you can then largely rely on them.

Building a game with a high opportunity for mastery, or with extensive customization and self-expression options, or with strong social systems that give the player a clear idea of where they stand in the community—these are things that players will always want, in some form or another. So, you’re right: if that part ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, if you discover in your analysis that one of your three satisfaction pillars is a tad weak, then a new version is a perfect time to shore that up. It will always pay off, if you can execute on those features well.

It Brings Out Disagreements Early

Mitch: Our process of creating our own taste maps saw initial discussions of franchise maps, followed by members of our senior leadership team each creating their own versions of what our taste maps should be. These were then used as discussion drivers in creative meetings aimed at establishing our direction.

We often found that one member of the team would have a significantly different take on where we should target on a specific axis.

This would tend to indicate a very different perspective, which was useful in driving discussion and debate. It also resulted in a large portion of our team having a deeper understanding of our direction and a sense of ownership over it that they hadn’t in past productions.

I’m going to go ahead and state that I think you have hit on the #1 most valuable part of integrating this tool into a dev team’s process.

What happened for you is exactly what happened for us. And, resolving those differences and disagreements about what we were shooting for (years in advance of the game’s release!) produced several key things (some of which you mention above):

We caught the disagreements ahead of time, before they could cause much damage (in the form of lost work or game incoherence).

Once the disagreement was resolved, we all had a clearer idea of where we were all going.

Collectively, we had more confidence in our direction, since we all understood why we were targeting that specific feature or experience.

Having the why in place well ahead of ramping up for production meant that when we did go wide and started working on everything at once, our key leadership all were very clear about the vision and the goal, and in a way that was easy to remember.

It is difficult to measure how valuable this was. The effect of that knowledge would be that we would not need to have as many discussions on this topic, so how do we measure the impact?

Still, my experience on other projects tells me that it mattered quite a lot. Since we already understood the goals, we didn't improvise quite as much. I believe it was a huge part of our success.

Some Axes Are Unclear

Mitch: Through the process of discussing our Taste Maps, we ran into several tension points where there was disagreement and uncertainty on what the different axes mean.

A lot of discussion, for instance, revolved around the differences and specific definitions of Multiplayer, Solo, Coop, and Combat.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gave our team a valuable tool to align our own definitions of these things. However, our experience was that there was a degree of uncertainty in the specific meanings of the axes, which could result in each team using the model with customized definitions, making cross-team communication a bit more difficult.

We found similar problems, and sometimes around the same axes. I think those ones could use a naming update.

If I were to approach that problem today, I might do something like this: Crowd <—> Alone (NPCs don’t count, only real people), and Together <—> Against.

I’m not 100% sure that this would resolve the problem. But that’s how I see it today.

Would Be Great To Have Personas

Mitch: I have noticed a bit of an issue around the need for more memorable or chunky information from the maps, but I think this is basically solved by what you mentioned around building some player personas.

[ Reader: The context for this is that there is one part of the whole mapping process that I didn’t find a good way to explain in my GDC talk (given the time constraints and the amount of information I was already downloading onto my audience): player personas.

What we did (in brief) was to take our taste maps and then generate four imaginary players that covered all of the most extreme tastes in our chart (by simply placing four dots on our map, one dot per Domain, in the furthest corner of the taste zone). We then generated some basic demographics about who they might be.

At that point, we could use those personas as a more accessible way of talking about what the maps meant in terms of real players.

So... I shared this info with Mitch on the sidewalk at GDC when he mentioned some of the challenges he had faced using the system. After I got done explaining the missing link, he looked at me...

...and for a minute I thought he was gonna punch me or something. Like, “DUDE. WHY DID YOU NOT MENTION THIS IN YOUR TALK.”

But then he smiled, and said something like “Yeah! I bet that would do it!” and moved on.

He didn't punch me at all! Nice guys, these Relic people! ]

Mitch: I attempted to improve it a bit for our team by breaking out some broadly categorized player types based on our maps, but I think your idea of building more fleshed out characters would work better.

The main issue is just that people sometimes have troubles keeping the maps as a whole in their mind, whereas more chunked info like “George” or “Skilled Builders” is a bit easier for people to grok and use in discussion. So a tool like the personas you described seems like a pretty solid add-on to the existing model based on our experience.

Yup. I wish I had presented it in the first talk. Maybe the next one!

It Reduces Team Tension

Mitch: A major benefit I’ve found has definitely been the ability for the design team to specify our focus and intent based on the taste maps to other team members.

This has actually relieved a lot of tension on our team related to past projects. I’d guess you may have seen similar things on For Honor, but because RTS games are a bit of a niche it’s helped us communicate much better why specific team members aren’t connecting with our current drives (eg: team members who may be more strongly attached to building and solo gameplay and don’t connect with the game while we worked on skilled multiplayer focused features are no longer uncomfortable with the situation).

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. And, furthermore, YES.

One of the hardest moments to get through smoothly in game development is the moment where a dev who is working on a feature says “well, I don’t even get why we’re making this. I mean, players want <the opposite of what the feature offers>, not <the thing the feature offers>.”

Awkward.

Because what do you do? At that moment, your team member is not asking to be educated about the broad variety in player tastes, and probably has been simmering on this gripe for quite a while! It’s a moment that is fraught with peril for a team culture…

…and having the taste map to refer to is an amazing method of short-cutting the assumption of unanimity among players that is the core problem there. The chart demonstrates in clear terms not only that variety exists on these spectra, but what the positive opposite of your personal taste actually is.

We found exactly what you have found: a team that understands the broad variety of their player’s tastes can work more smoothly, because then your personal taste doesn’t have to be treated as though it were right or wrong.

Seems Like It Works

Mitch: The TL;DR is that your model is definitely working well for us. There’s some tweaks I’d like to make on our usage around satisfaction maps and getting more digestible player types, but overall it’s been great.

Thanks for going to all the work of putting together your model and process and sharing it by the way, it’s been super helpful for us.

Nothing beats learning that the work has actually mattered to someone else, man. Thank you.

Conclusion

What is so amazing to me about Mitch’s commentary and his team’s experience of using the tool is how precisely it mirrors our own experience. It would be one thing if the tool simply worked as designed, right? But here, what I see is that the exact same follow-on effects have developed on his team.

The increase in clarity and commitment. The broad acceptance of the tool as valuable. The decrease in tension.

These appear to not only be effects local to the For Honor team. Once is a fluke, but twice is maybe a pattern.

If the deployment of the Engines of Play into a project can produce those kinds of effects even just more often than not, then that goes a long way towards demonstrating that maybe it isn’t just a pretty model.

I’m excited to be able to make the claim that maybe it’s actually a good idea, and to have some data to back it up.

Thanks, Mitch, for taking the time to share your team’s experience. Thanks, Relic people, for letting me write this piece. And thanks to all the amazing devs at Relic Entertainment: congratulations on a huge launch. I look forward to enjoying your games for many years to come.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Note: This post (originally published at darklorde.com) is all about the Engines of Play. If you are not familiar with Taste/Satisfaction Maps and their uses, the Big 5, Self-Determination Theory, etc, I highly recommend watching this video before reading the article. It will make so much more sense. Like, Oh Em Gee.]

A Random Encounter With Relic

I’m in San Francisco. It’s GDC, so the sidewalks of the Moscone Center are packed to bursting with nerds of every stripe. The day is bright. I cross Fourth street, on my way to Moscone North--and someone calls, “Jason!”

I wasn't surprised--it happens to me a lot at GDC. Stay in the games biz for long enough, and GDC will eventually become one big reunion.

What happened next, though, absolutely does not happen every day.

A friendly-faced fella pushes his way out of the crowd, and introduces himself as one Mitch Lagran, a Lead Designer at Relic Entertainment. While I unsuccessfully suppressed my fanboy reaction (because DAWN OF WAR OMFG), Mitch explains that he had attended my Engines of Play talk last year...

...and that Relic had actually implemented the methods I had laid out in that talk.

He claimed that he wanted to thank me for it because it had made a huge difference to their process and was great stuff. I stared at him and tried to think who had put him up to this.

I mean, no one actually implements that stuff. Come on! That’s not how the GDC works!

The GDC is supposed to be a place where you go and listen to people talking about lessons and techniques--ones that you desperately wish you could apply because wow it would make your dev life so much better--and then you go back to your studio and everyone tells you about how yeah maybe that stuff worked for those guys, but that it won’t work here, see, because our situation is different.

And then you sigh, and maybe you try again in three months. Eventually you just go about your business.

GDC is not where RELIC FREAKING ENTERTAINMENT goes to find whole new process for their game conception phases.

But, here’s this guy, and he’s shaking my hand, and he's expressing his gratitude and his appreciation, and I so I play it cool and say, “Really?! You… actually used my stuff?!?"

He nods.

I ask, "Uh… so, what happened?!”

He told me. Later, he sent me a more detailed description of what the results had been. And what he said blew my mind.

So, I asked him if I could write it up, and share it.

A More Proper Introduction

That’s the back story for what this post is about. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present something akin to an actual case study for what happens when you apply the Engines of Play (which includes these charts called Taste Maps, and the process of analysis that goes into them) to a real dev environment.

Hrm.

By “actual case study” what I really mean is “the guys at Relic were kind enough to describe in some detail what they did with the ideas, and what the results were”. That isn’t quite a full case study. It's more like a front-line report or something. BUT STILL. CLOSE ENOUGH.

I mean COME ON! How often does this kind of thing just happen?! Never. That's how often.

A quick reminder: The Engines of Play is a way to figure out what kind of player taste you are trying to target with your game, in a way that is quite a bit more specific than “achievers” or “shooter players”. The methods involved do require a little bit of coming-up-to-speed, but they benefit from being both fairly intuitive and being backed up by systems that have a metric-fuck-ton of academic white papers and research done on them.

Remember all that? No? Well, here's a couple of videos for you.

Good now? Great!

A Conversation With Relic

I mentioned earlier that Mitch Lagran was kind enough to send me a long description of how he and his team have used said Engines. For our purposes here, I think it’s best if I let Mitch speak for himself.

Mitch: Hey Jason, it was nice getting to meet you down at GDC. Hope you had a good one this year.

Likewise. You have a cool beard.

Mitch: Given that you seemed interested in feedback around our use of Engines of Play at Relic, I figured I’d give you a run-down of how we’ve used it and how it has worked out.

You da man.

Prepro: Good

Mitch: It’s worth keeping in mind that we are still early on in our production, so we haven’t started adapting your model with a production oriented mentality yet. I’m guessing that when we do, there may be some slight shifts on how we use it to communicate.

I can tell you from experience that its use in production is likely to simply diminish. Once the key design targets have been set, we found that the model drifts into the “background lore” of the project. It doesn’t seem to be all that useful during the meat of production.

We did find that near the end of production we experienced a brief resurgence in interest in the work. As we prepared our communication plans, and as the game was starting to come together, there was a storm of new conversations around confirming whether or not we had built what we had intended to build--and Taste Maps are great for that.

At that point, too, there were a lot of new people coming onto the project who had not been exposed to the method, and both found it surprising that we had done all that work so far in advance and found it surprising that it seemed to work.

So: high use in preproduction. Low use during production. Brief flurry of use right as the launch plans are being discussed in earnest for the first time. That was our experience, anyway.

I look forward to learning whether or not your experience turns out to be similar!

Broad Appeal

Mitch: Overall we’ve found a fairly strong degree of success in using it both as a design lens and as a communication tool for the team.

It came along as part of a larger initiative pushing towards more intent driven design and as a part of a broader design structure shift, so it is a bit difficult to separate its effects from everything else, but it has been called out as a valuable part of the changes.

It has seen praise that extends from our executive level down to junior devs, which seems pretty damn impressive to me.

I know, right?!?

That was the part about this approach that surprised me the most—that so many completely different groups of people involved in the production found it to be useful.

I originally designed the approach as a tool for designers, and expected that the sell would be a hard one with the marketing and business teams. But we found quite the opposite to be true! The biz people were enthusiastic, and (in my experience) already prepared to look at our game through this lens. Instant adopters.

I am psyched to hear that this might be a repeatable phenomenon.

Satisfaction Is Hard

Mitch: Generally, taste maps have had a stronger adoption than satisfaction maps.

I think that may be partly due to me not having pushed satisfaction maps quite as strongly, so it’s something I am planning on trying to work on (especially because I want to ensure that we have a strong connection to the PENS model on our team).

However, I also think that it is because Taste Maps include a more visual component, so team members find them easier to latch onto and express. Given that, I am hoping to explore some ways to present the satisfaction maps / PENS model in a way that will give people a stronger connection to it.

I found the same thing. I think there are many complicating factors here.

Here's one: I found that discussing satisfaction is just harder than discussing taste. My theory is that because its effects are so much more remote than the immediate-gratification of taste that most people are simply under-prepared to think about the whole concept. I know that I was, and that it took long years of effort to really get the feeling for how satisfaction works. It’s still a work in progress for me, in fact.

That said: wow is long-term satisfaction important. I have come to understand that if you make a game that only offers short-term taste satisfaction, that people will play it for 30 minutes and then never come back. The core three satisfactions of Self-Determination Theory / PENS give us the reasons why people will come to believe that your game is worth spending some of their precious time on this planet on.

It is tricky to think about. But learn it: the success of your game depends on it.

(I agree with you about the part about the visual component for SDT kinda sucking. I think the way I laid out satisfaction maps was sort of a cop-out, and deserves a better approach than just “fill in these three boxes”. We’ll see if something better can be developed.)

Brand Analysis FTW

Mitch: As our team is not working on a new IP,

(FOR THE EMPEROR!!!!)

we might have had some different uses for it than you on For Honor. Specifically, we went through an early exercise analyzing past entries in our franchise using taste maps and satisfaction maps.

That’s... so... cooooooooooool!!

Mitch: This was part of a larger effort aimed at a reverse / hindsight engineering of the overall creative direction of the franchise. Engines of Play was a hugely valuable tool in this process.

It gave us a strong lens to view the successes of the franchise through. We then used that to base future development off of.

We basically took the franchise maps as a base that we should build on, and used the taste maps as a way to choose targeted areas we wanted to improve. Our output was ultimately an overlay of the two, showing the original franchise maps with our targeted improvements on top.

This also gave us a tool to discuss the scope of both improvements and maintenance (the latter being the amount of work required to maintain the same degree of success in any specific axis in a modern iteration of the franchise).

So basically, if we had rated the franchise has having best-in-class coop in the initial taste-map, we did an assessment of how changes in coop play in modern games would affect our ability to hit that mark.

From there, we would choose specific areas where the past franchise had scored lower and we felt would be strong candidates for ratcheting up the next iteration, based on how feasible it would be to fit into our scope and how closely the different axes aligned with existing creative direction.

I am so impressed by this. I had some vague notion as we were working on this that you could maybe apply taste maps to genres, or something, but I never investigated it. What you describe here, with taste map overlays (overlays!!) frankly seems so obvious now that you’ve explained it that I am going to just adopt it into my design process.

I also adore the idea of re-evaluating the viability of your features through the lens of “are we still best-in-class?” during pre-production. That sounds to me like a process that literally everyone involved in production could get behind, understand, and participate in.

Good one, guys.

Brand Satisfaction Is Stable

Mitch: In the process above, Satisfaction Maps were used in a similar way. We used them to establish where the sense of satisfaction has come from in the past, with the idea that we can use that as a required foundational base.

Basically, it gave us the parts of the game we should not disturb, but should instead aim to improve and build around.

It’s funny, right? Satisfaction theory (SDT, etc) is so damned important, but once the core pieces are in place and working (which, if you have made a successful game, must be true), you can then largely rely on them.

Building a game with a high opportunity for mastery, or with extensive customization and self-expression options, or with strong social systems that give the player a clear idea of where they stand in the community—these are things that players will always want, in some form or another. So, you’re right: if that part ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, if you discover in your analysis that one of your three satisfaction pillars is a tad weak, then a new version is a perfect time to shore that up. It will always pay off, if you can execute on those features well.

It Brings Out Disagreements Early

Mitch: Our process of creating our own taste maps saw initial discussions of franchise maps, followed by members of our senior leadership team each creating their own versions of what our taste maps should be. These were then used as discussion drivers in creative meetings aimed at establishing our direction.

We often found that one member of the team would have a significantly different take on where we should target on a specific axis.

This would tend to indicate a very different perspective, which was useful in driving discussion and debate. It also resulted in a large portion of our team having a deeper understanding of our direction and a sense of ownership over it that they hadn’t in past productions.

I’m going to go ahead and state that I think you have hit on the #1 most valuable part of integrating this tool into a dev team’s process.

What happened for you is exactly what happened for us. And, resolving those differences and disagreements about what we were shooting for (years in advance of the game’s release!) produced several key things (some of which you mention above):

We caught the disagreements ahead of time, before they could cause much damage (in the form of lost work or game incoherence).

Once the disagreement was resolved, we all had a clearer idea of where we were all going.

Collectively, we had more confidence in our direction, since we all understood why we were targeting that specific feature or experience.

Having the why in place well ahead of ramping up for production meant that when we did go wide and started working on everything at once, our key leadership all were very clear about the vision and the goal, and in a way that was easy to remember.

It is difficult to measure how valuable this was. The effect of that knowledge would be that we would not need to have as many discussions on this topic, so how do we measure the impact?

Still, my experience on other projects tells me that it mattered quite a lot. Since we already understood the goals, we didn't improvise quite as much. I believe it was a huge part of our success.

Some Axes Are Unclear

Mitch: Through the process of discussing our Taste Maps, we ran into several tension points where there was disagreement and uncertainty on what the different axes mean.

A lot of discussion, for instance, revolved around the differences and specific definitions of Multiplayer, Solo, Coop, and Combat.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gave our team a valuable tool to align our own definitions of these things. However, our experience was that there was a degree of uncertainty in the specific meanings of the axes, which could result in each team using the model with customized definitions, making cross-team communication a bit more difficult.

We found similar problems, and sometimes around the same axes. I think those ones could use a naming update.

If I were to approach that problem today, I might do something like this: Crowd <—> Alone (NPCs don’t count, only real people), and Together <—> Against.

I’m not 100% sure that this would resolve the problem. But that’s how I see it today.

Would Be Great To Have Personas

Mitch: I have noticed a bit of an issue around the need for more memorable or chunky information from the maps, but I think this is basically solved by what you mentioned around building some player personas.

[ Reader: The context for this is that there is one part of the whole mapping process that I didn’t find a good way to explain in my GDC talk (given the time constraints and the amount of information I was already downloading onto my audience): player personas.

What we did (in brief) was to take our taste maps and then generate four imaginary players that covered all of the most extreme tastes in our chart (by simply placing four dots on our map, one dot per Domain, in the furthest corner of the taste zone). We then generated some basic demographics about who they might be.

At that point, we could use those personas as a more accessible way of talking about what the maps meant in terms of real players.

So... I shared this info with Mitch on the sidewalk at GDC when he mentioned some of the challenges he had faced using the system. After I got done explaining the missing link, he looked at me...

...and for a minute I thought he was gonna punch me or something. Like, “DUDE. WHY DID YOU NOT MENTION THIS IN YOUR TALK.”

But then he smiled, and said something like “Yeah! I bet that would do it!” and moved on.

He didn't punch me at all! Nice guys, these Relic people! ]

Mitch: I attempted to improve it a bit for our team by breaking out some broadly categorized player types based on our maps, but I think your idea of building more fleshed out characters would work better.

The main issue is just that people sometimes have troubles keeping the maps as a whole in their mind, whereas more chunked info like “George” or “Skilled Builders” is a bit easier for people to grok and use in discussion. So a tool like the personas you described seems like a pretty solid add-on to the existing model based on our experience.

Yup. I wish I had presented it in the first talk. Maybe the next one!

It Reduces Team Tension

Mitch: A major benefit I’ve found has definitely been the ability for the design team to specify our focus and intent based on the taste maps to other team members.

This has actually relieved a lot of tension on our team related to past projects. I’d guess you may have seen similar things on For Honor, but because RTS games are a bit of a niche it’s helped us communicate much better why specific team members aren’t connecting with our current drives (eg: team members who may be more strongly attached to building and solo gameplay and don’t connect with the game while we worked on skilled multiplayer focused features are no longer uncomfortable with the situation).

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. And, furthermore, YES.

One of the hardest moments to get through smoothly in game development is the moment where a dev who is working on a feature says “well, I don’t even get why we’re making this. I mean, players want <the opposite of what the feature offers>, not <the thing the feature offers>.”

Awkward.

Because what do you do? At that moment, your team member is not asking to be educated about the broad variety in player tastes, and probably has been simmering on this gripe for quite a while! It’s a moment that is fraught with peril for a team culture…

…and having the taste map to refer to is an amazing method of short-cutting the assumption of unanimity among players that is the core problem there. The chart demonstrates in clear terms not only that variety exists on these spectra, but what the positive opposite of your personal taste actually is.

We found exactly what you have found: a team that understands the broad variety of their player’s tastes can work more smoothly, because then your personal taste doesn’t have to be treated as though it were right or wrong.

Seems Like It Works

Mitch: The TL;DR is that your model is definitely working well for us. There’s some tweaks I’d like to make on our usage around satisfaction maps and getting more digestible player types, but overall it’s been great.

Thanks for going to all the work of putting together your model and process and sharing it by the way, it’s been super helpful for us.

Nothing beats learning that the work has actually mattered to someone else, man. Thank you.

Conclusion

What is so amazing to me about Mitch’s commentary and his team’s experience of using the tool is how precisely it mirrors our own experience. It would be one thing if the tool simply worked as designed, right? But here, what I see is that the exact same follow-on effects have developed on his team.

The increase in clarity and commitment. The broad acceptance of the tool as valuable. The decrease in tension.

These appear to not only be effects local to the For Honor team. Once is a fluke, but twice is maybe a pattern.

If the deployment of the Engines of Play into a project can produce those kinds of effects even just more often than not, then that goes a long way towards demonstrating that maybe it isn’t just a pretty model.

I’m excited to be able to make the claim that maybe it’s actually a good idea, and to have some data to back it up.

Thanks, Mitch, for taking the time to share your team’s experience. Thanks, Relic people, for letting me write this piece. And thanks to all the amazing devs at Relic Entertainment: congratulations on a huge launch. I look forward to enjoying your games for many years to come.